Sandstorm in Iraq

Oh the pictures you find in the Flickr Iraq feed. Amazing.

Cory in CGW

This is from the fine-print crawl on p. 26 of the new issue of Computer Gaming World:

Author Cory Doctorow is promoting his new novel witha virtual book tour. His first stop? The MMO Second Life.

The new book is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Cory promoted his previous book via Second Life. This time, though, Second Lifers are trying to create a book object in-world that they can read, with turnable pages, since Cory donated a copy of the text to them.

Not to mention that it's so cool to come across Cory's name in CGW.

Preleaking encores

From BradSucks:

[01:01] very very soon it would seem that preleaking an album will be like a band leaving the stage before their encore

[01:01] just totally expected, even though everyone can see it for what it is

All part of the way the Net is disintermediating time.

Ok, so that phrase means absolutely nothing. But it sounds damn good. In fact, the Net is making time more complex, smudging it, interlineating it, hyperlinking it, depriving it of its gatekeeping function.

Ok, that didn't mean much. Here's what's actually happening, IMO: We have social conventions that let us act as if there are moments that strictly divide one state from another, especially when it comes to making things public: products, artworks, selves. But now the public revelation of a work happens as the work grows. And after it's made public, many objects are fluid enough that they remain in process. Time is not as neatly divided as it used to be.

But "disintermediating time" sounds so much better!

Also from BradSucks:

Uncyclopedia on Air Guitar - the Uncyclopedia (it’s like Wikipedia, but all lies) article on air guitar is worth a read.

Also from BradSucks: New songs, including

Certain Death
Total Breakdown
Understood By Your Dad
You're Not Going Anywhere
Dropping Out Of School

All free of course. Which is why you ought to buy them. [Technorati tags: bradsucks music time]

Linux on Xbox: The shape of DRM to come

Michael Robertson, who funded the $200,000 attempt to get Linux running on an Xbox, writes about the XBox's successful DRM implementation as a harbinger of Longhorn:

In spite of sharing the insides with a traditional PC, the Xbox has a dramatic and dangerous difference. A PC buyer can install any software or hardware that they wish. They own the machine and can change it to suit their needs - true ownership. There are no limitations. This open architecture is largely responsible for the two-decade personal computer revolution. With an Xbox, the user is merely renting the box. Microsoft decides what software (games) users can load and even how they can use it. When it connects to the net, Microsoft can and has instructed the machine to change its behavior to block certain users, functionality or software that it does not agree with. They are changing the rules after you purchase it to suit their needs and not your needs.

The Xbox served as the training wheels for Microsoft's new Longhorn operating system, which is slipping to a 2007 launch. Like the Xbox, Longhorn will limit what software you can load. In the guise of "security", Microsoft is trying to dramatically change the way PCs work. Instead of the owner deciding what software they want to install and run, Microsoft is seizing that power from them. Under the smokescreen of security, they are pronouncing that it is good for Microsoft to decide what software you can use.

Kids' drawings from Darfur

At Global Voices, Ethan blogs about children's drawings of the horrors of Darfur.

"The Janjaweed came on camels and horses, very fast. Sometimes two on one camel, with guns. Many soldiers, with guns. This one is a machine gun. They were shooting us."

"These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people."

"Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened"

"We needed help. There was no one to protect us."

Rebecca's Vietnam photos

She took some nice 'uns on her recent trip, which you can read all about here. [Technorati tag: vietnam]

Joe Mahoney's ontology

No, not ontology in the computer science. Ontology in the "logos of being" sense, whatever that means, which is exactly why my friend Joe turns to poetry.

Also, it's spring. [Technorati tag: poetry]

Global Voices gets even better

Global Voices now is running roundups of the news. Surprisingly, there are things going on in the world! GV is a daily must-read for me.

And to hear some actual voices, you can listen to Ben Walker's Theory of Everything episode about GV here. [Technorati tag: globalvoices]

Bill Gates demands more heterosexual foreign engineers

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates yesterday urged the Bush administration and lawmakers Wednesday to abolish immigration limits on heterosexual foreign engineers who can be hired by U.S. companies.

Ok, so I'm combining two stories...

Scare Your Child Straight Day

I'm at corporate HQ in Atlanta where the unusual number of kids is explained by the fact that it's Bring Your Child to Work day. And thus ends childhood.

Note to self: Invest in anti-depressants.

I remember going to work with my father — he was a labor lawyer for NY State — and, well, let's say it did not fill me with a desire to grow up. Still doesn't.

Yahoo News' cool touch

Yahoo News has been redesigned for the better. Unlike Google News, it doesn't automatically figure out what's news by looking at thousands of news sources. Instead, it defaults to showing you the news from one of six major news sources, one source at a time, although you can add any RSS feed as a new source. I like the fact that at Google you're likely to find an Indian or Chinese newspaper's version of, say, an American political story, but Yahoo — which is configurable, while Google News is not — presents more stories on a single page than Google does.

If you want to see how Yahoo manages the problem of compressing more news stories per square inch of screen real estate, hover over any of the news links for a second or two...

Cool! [Technorati tags: yahoo google news]

Rasiej for Advocate

Andrew Rasiej is running for Public Advocate of NYC. He would transform this position into a true voice of the people...not to mention that he'll do very cool things with the Net. Heck, his theme is "A New Campaign to Reconnect New York."

You can sign up here. And here's the campaign's blog.

Go Andrew! [Technorati tags: AndrewRasiej politics]

I should have mentioned not only have I met Andrew a few times, for a couple of months I was on the payroll of Personal Democracy Forum (to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars total), which Andrew generously bankrolls. Sorry for the lapse, but I promise you that my enthusiasm for his candidacy is based on knowing something about him and not on the money that changed hands.

Tell Steve Jobs he's a vain, petty tyrant

Jobs doesn't like what a biographer says about him so he stops Apple stores from selling all books by that publisher? Note that he's not just keeping the book he doesn't like out of the store. No, he's de-shelving any book from that publisher in retaliation.

You can pre-order the book here. Let's drive it up the charts. (Hey, Amazon, how about pairing this book with a Dixie Chicks album?) [Technorati tags: apple SteveJobs DixieChicks]

A million deaths from malaria

TotheSource calls for a reform of how the US spends our money on malaria prevention and treatment. It argues that small amount of DDT could save many lives without causing environmental damage.

I'm not an expert in, well, anything, so I don't know how much DDT it takes to start screwing up the ecosystem, nor do I know how effective it is at preventing malaria when used in small amounts on house walls, as ToTheSource suggests. But wel over a million deaths a year — most of them children? And apparently the US aid agency, USAID, has not been forthright about how it spends our money.

(The article is not yet up on the ToTheSource site. Check the archive eventually, for "Silent Tsunami.") [Technorati tag: malaria]

Chris Locke has a disturbing bit of history on display at ChiefBloggingOfficer, discussing research into America's history of support of eugenics, including Margaret Sanger's belief in the "mass sterilization of so-called defectives."

Les Photos

Doc's photos from Les Blogs 2005 in Paris, the lucky bastard! [Technorati tag: lesblogs2005]

danah judging community

danah blogs enthusiastically about her time in Austria being a judge for Prix Ars Electronica. Apparently, the discussion of what constitutes a community was vibrant and informed by a sense of the differences in the world. A snipppet:

We had a long conversation about what it means to think about two axes - the process of giving people access and the process of allowing people to make their voices heard. So much of what we considered sat in this narrative. We talked about technologies themselves vs. the communities that take the technologies to a newer, deeper level. We talked about work from around the world that fit into so many different cultural contexts with so many different languages.

[scs] Community

Amy Bruckman at George Institute of Tech says that researchers knock the use of the word "community." We ought to use a prototype model for defining communities, using Eleanor Rosch's idea of prototypes, she says. [Go Rosch!]. Our prototypes for communities vary by "genre," e.g., Flickr is one type of community and so is the WELL; we understand them in relation to different prototypes. The work she proposes going forward would try to discern the relevant differences among the prototypes.

Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon's CommunityLab Project begins by upbraiding the conference for using a panel of kids to discover what kids think instead of using the serious research that's been done on the topic. He suggests using group theory to design online groups. For example, in many online communities, a small percentage of people (80:20, roughly) contribute. The "collective effort model" explans under contribution and the conditions that mitigate it. It says that "effort = outcome probability x outcome value." It predicts you can increase contribution by make salient the uniqueness of contributions, increasing how much people like the group by making it more homogeneous, and make the benefits of contributing more salient. (This is based on well-established research, he says.)

He describes two experiments.

First: To get more people to contribute movie ratings, the system reminded posters of their uniqueness (identify a movie the person has rated but no one else has) and made the group more attractive by putting together people with similar tastes. Results: Uniqueness increased the number of discussion posts and movie ratings, but similarity in tastes depressed the posts. (The first finding supports the hypothesis, the second disconfirms it.)

Second: They sent email inviting people to contribute ratings. Some were told thjey've been invited because they have unusual tastes, others because they have typical tastes. Some were told that the more ratings they contribute, the better the system works for you, or for other people. Again, emphasizing uniqueness helped, but being told the number of benefits they would get depressed the results.

He concludes by looking at how useful it is to approach the design of online communities by starting with theory. He found that it inspired design features not often used and allows for reuse of principles.

Randy Farmer, now at Yahoo! but an early pioneer in Net communities, says that at last we're ready to scale. But, he points out, there are problems with scaling communities, including spam, fraud and "intellectual property" issues.

Massively Multiplayer games have blazed one trail, Randy says, raising hard questions of virtual economies and property law: Are virtual goods property? He says Sony is enabling an actual cash market for Everquest.

Social networking has blazed another path. Because too much info was published with too little to do with it, selective disclosure is arising.

Challenges: Boundaries of identity and disclosure. How do we scale trust? Answer: "Hand the trust question over to the users." He says Yahoo's "This is spam" is an example of handing trust to users. And how will public-scale tagging avoid tagspam. How do we do "pagerank" for tags?

1. Tag rating: Positive reputation: "537 people tag this as penguin" Negative: People respond to a tag saying "This is not a penguin."

2. Tagger reputation: As people are known for putting better tags on things, their tags count for more.

David MacDonald at U of Washington looks at "visual blogging communities" — sites with photos and a little text. (Example 1 2 3) His project has been archiving 9-25 sites of the 53+ he knows about. They picked 19 sites with at least 3 months of data. You can do content analysis (what's in the picture?), ethnographic analysis (what is this picture about?), and interaction analysis (what's the relation among a set of pictures).

He talks about preliminary results from the interaction analysis. He suggests some categories: Positional polay (glance, point), inmage stealing (re-use), theme (impromptu or planned group action), text in picture as a title (which forms the majority of the interaction). Then he gives great examples of how people engage in various forms of "conversation" in these photo sites via their images. (Molly Wright Steenson in the backchannel points to the Internet employee of the month page at Flickr.)

Fernanda B. Viegas at MIT Media Lab talks about a project visualizing the evolution of wiki pages. She's been visualizing archives: email, usenet, chat. She shows work, with Martin Wattenberg, in visualizing wikis as a way of understanding the dynamics of the community that builds them. You can play with it yourself: HistoryFlow. She points to the abortion page, showing how quickly it gets restored. And she points to the chocolate page where a zigzag pattern indicates an editing war, in this case over whether there is such a thing as a "chocolate collage." The patterns also show that the text of the people who start a page tends to be long-lived.

She says IBM is releasing the software and will likely also release the Wikipedia plugin.

[Excellent morning.]

[Technorati tags: scs2005 community]

Fun about places

Satellite Fun finds some amusing photos in Google's collection of satellite images (similar to here and here, previously blogged). It also has a link to City-Data that displays long lists of data about various cities. For example, did you know that between 7:30 and 8:00AM, 201 people over 16 leave for work in Great Barrington, MA, making that the peak leaving-for-work time in this city of 7,527? [Technorati tags: maps google]

[scs] IBM Research

Wendy Kellogg from IBM Research says that IBM replaced its solid doors with ones with windows so you could see if someone is on the other side before you slam the door into her. They call this "social translucence." Not only can you see the person, but the other person knows that you know, which creates accountability. Social translucence is common in the real world but rare in computing systems, she says. She talks about how this got idea got implemented in the Babble and Loops projects that provide a minimalistic graphical "proxy" that provides some of the metadata that occurs naturally in face-to-face meetings. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware ibm]

[scs] Curriculum

Molly Wright Steenson talks about some interesting student experiments. In one, students put up official-looking "Silence please!" signs in a car of an Italian commuter train, resulting in that car being the loudest in the train. Another was a favor bank. Another, Mass Distraction, studies the social interactions around being interrupted by cellphones: In one example, you have to close your hood around your entire head in order to take a call. In another, if you get a call, you have to give your friend a video game to play and your call lasts only as long as she keeps on playing. At FashionVictims you can see clothing that bleeds when it comes in contact with cellphone radiation. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware mollySteenson]

[scs] Anthropologists

Anne Kirah is Senior Design Anthropologist for Microsoft. She lives in Paris. She points to some of the oddities (from a US pov) of how cyworld.com (Korea) and Almererulez (Netherlands) are used. She gives lots of great examples of how cultural norms affect the take-up of tech, especially IM, text messaging, and the like.

Genevieve Bell from Intel Research points out that technology is not just going to be in our hands as we commute, it's going to be in rural villages, powered by truck batteries, etc. We'll see work-arounds to unexpected problems, she says, such as cellphone charging stations. She says the most popular phone service in China is a novella being sent out to cellphones via subscription, in part because cellphones can display 120 words, not just 120 characters. She says 30% of Koreans with Internet connections at home nevertheless use cyber-cafes because of the social millieu and because there is fragmentation across devices. She talks about the Indonesian e-mosque project, providing access through mosques because they are close to ubiquitous; Indonesia built access into the existing infastructure.

In most of Africa, she says, "flashing and peeping" predominate: You signal that you've arrived somewhere by calling home and hanging up. Families have developed remarkably sophisticated codes: Call once means "Where are you going?" Call twice means "I've arrived," etc. She says that 95% of calls are incomplete. And flashing and peeping are being adopted by the African community in Europe.

Her conclusions: We should think more broadly about what computers can or should do, and we should be prepared to critically interrogate taken-for-granted terms and ideas. We could even look outside of the US for new technology cutures and design inspirations. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

[scs] Teenage panel

Six teenagers from a local sci/tech high school give presentations on how they're using their computers socially in the course of a day. Random tidbits (kidbits?):

One got a gift certificate for iTunes, but otherwise she uses Limewire (a gnutella shell).

Text messaging costs too much to use.

One wishes there were upgrades for cellphones since hers can't receive photos from others.

It's rude to call up a friend just to ask about a homework question. So she uses IM.

One does a lot of Photoshopping and enjoys Audacity for remixing.

One doesn't do much with IM but spends a lot of time on online forums about games.

One has a gmail address, a school address, and a "hotmail address for my junk mail."

Q: Do you listen to podcasts? A: To what???

A few have blogs. One uses deadjournal instead of livejournal because it's simpler and easier to figure out.

Q: Do you use Typepad? A: Never heard of it.

Blogging was big last year, but now it's not. People got tired of commenting on their lives and sharing their lives.

One keeps a secret blog to put the feelings she doesn't want to share.

One has blacked out all the names of her friends and all of their content in the screen captures she shows us in order to protect their privacy.

Some of the banner ads are fun to play especially since the popup blockers block the popups that result from, say, swatting the fly.

One's phone broke, and even though she only talks on it maybe once a day, she "freaked out," feeling completely disconnected.

"My attention span is just too short for email. I need a rapid response."

They tend to use a handful of away messages. They do not use different screennames for different groups of friends.

They think the remixing they're doing is within the law because they're not redistributing the results. They think people will always invent new ways to get around any legal limitations on filesharing. They have no idea that "trusted computing" is going to lock down content.

They only buy music when it's so new that they can't find it on filesharing.

[Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

[scs] Social Computing Symposium

I'm at the second Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in Redmond, a group of about 100 academics and normals. Last year, the conference was useful mainly outside of the presentations (and I say this as one of the presenters) because we didn't quite figure out how to talk with one another in a public forum. This year, it's more discussion-oriented. They even switched from last year's One Big Room format to a hotel with some nooks and crannies.

The main room is a typical set up: long tables with chairs, all facing forward. (I'm sitting next to Liz!). But Shelly Farnham has us do an unusual opening exercise: A person stands up, says a few sentences about herself, and throws a ball of string at someone she knows, creating a physical knot of people.

The IRC is at irc.freenode.net #scs. Come join us. [Technorati tags: scs SocialSoftware]

Open the RAW

RAW files contain the raw, low-level info about the state of the camera when you took a digital photo. It's important to the pros but it remains undocumented. Now Stanley Krute writes, in an email:

..we're launching a website today that'll spearhead our campaign to get the camera manufacturers to document their RAW formats. The website is here: http://OpenRAW.org There's a press release here: http://OpenRAW.org/press/

Sounds like just the sort of thing wikis were built for. Anyway, good luck to the RAW folks. [Technorati tags: raw photography]

Stark optical mouse

The Stark (or is it spelled "S+ark"? Hard to tell) mouse from Microsoft is lovely — a chromium version of some bicameral body part. But the entire left and right side serve as the buttons, which means that you have no place to rest your hand. As a result, I end up clicking three times by mistake for every time I intend to. As my father would have said: Designed by someone who never used it. Ack.

(I'm being rude to my hosts. I'm at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, and the mouse was part of the swag. So I should at least mention the two lovely books they gave us, including The Interventionists from a very cool exhibit at Mass MoCA. Also, dinner last night was lots of fun.) [Technorati tag: PhilippeStark]

The size of topics

In the course of researching a column for KMWorld:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has about 65,000 topics spread across 32 volumes, for a total of 44,000,000 words. Average size of a topic: 676 words. [source]

Wikipedia has over 500,000 topics in English. Average length (using year-old figures): 294 .

BTW, I may have found an error in Wikipedia's Britannica entry. It currently says: "As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles, with 44 million words." That page count refers to the online version, but I think the word count applies to the print version. I haven't found a word count for the online version.

I haven't corrected the Wikipedia article because I haven't found a source that really clarifies this. Besides, I've never gotten a fact right. [Technorati tag: wikipedia]

On the road again

Traveling to Seattle today for two days at a Microsoft social software conference, a morning at Amazon doing research for my book, and a morning talking with CNN about taxonomic stuff. Back on Thursday night, possibly too late to catch Steve Johnson's free talk at Harvard, which you would be nuts to miss if you're anywhere nearby.

Canadian mashups

From an email from Jon del Mothe:

Our prime minister (Paul Martin) and his party (liberals) are in a fair amount of hot water over an ad sponsorship scandal in Quebec.

On Thursday night he took over the airways to try and calm (and avoid an immediate election).

All other Media covered it their usual fashion - we took a different approach and mashed it in the mag, cover can be seen here and then let our audience mash back. Some good ones!

There are indeed some good ones. I'm particularly fond of the second one by Marc L that turns the talking-head speech into an American-style news network drama. (His first entry is funny also.)

(See page 4 of the Dose PDF for straightforward reporting on the speech. Then read the cover mashup.) [Technorati tags: dose PaulMartin mashup]

Del.icio.us bundles

Del.icio.us has a feature in beta that lets you collect a set of your tags into a "bundle" that then shows up at the top of the your personal page. For example, if you declare the tags "parody," "sarcasm" and "puns" to be part of a "humor" bundle, all three of those tags will be listed under a big, bold "Humor" on the right hand side of your del.icio.us home page. You can create a bundle by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle.

(Thanks to Hanan Cohen who found this at LibraryStuff who found it at BlogDriversWaltz. Very interesting discussions at both those sites.) [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy delicious]

Meredith Sue Willis Fiesta!

Merry Willis, my sister-in-law the writer, has had a bunch of writing published recently.

You can read "The Story of Scheherezade and Dunzyad" in The Pedestal Magazine here. How can you go wrong with a story that begins "Except for the eunuchs..."? It's a terrific read...sort of Scheherezade fan-fiction.

And the American Book Review gives Merry's Dwight's House and Other Stories a very positive review. That book and her new sf novel, The City Built of Starships, are both finalists for Foreward Magazine's Book-of-the-Year award. Go Meredith Sue! [Technorati tags: MeredithSueWillis fiction]

Booker Rising

Booker Rising describes itself as a "News site for black moderates and black conservatives." It aggregates news stories through that filter and comments on them briefly. In my poking around, it seemed pretty fair, and I'm finding stories there that I'd otherwise miss. (Thanks to Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice.)

(BTW, hardly any of the left column displays in Firefox, but it does in IE.)

Powerful MP3 tag editor

I'm trying to whip my collection of MP3s into basic shape so that I can find them via the rather limited UI of my Creative Nomad Not-an-iPod Zen player. (Oy, so now I'm taxonomizing on the weekends!) And The Godfather has turned out to be really helpful. It's overly-featured from my point of view, but I have minimal needs. And it sure seems to do the job. Want to tag all the tracks in your Bach directory as artist="Bach, JS" and rename them using a "Composer - Album - Track" format? This is the tool for you. (Well, I actually haven't figured out how to do the renaming, but it's definitely a key feature.) It's free, it's got a scripting capability, and it's well-supported by a forum. Thank you, JTClipper!

The Christian Science Bloggy Monitor

Ethan has a great data-driven post, analyzing which US newspapers have the highest number of blog links per paper subscribers. The winner, hands down, is the admirable Christian Science Monitor.

Ethan wraps up with this:

Is there a way for the Monitor to embrace it's unique status and become the "official paper of the blogosphere"? Or is the Monitor slated to become one of the first — and most tragic — casualties of the move from paper to bits?

Ethan's continuing work gives statistics a good name :) [Technorati tags: media CSM EthanZuckerman]

Steve Johnson talks about his new book

Steve is going to give a free talk about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You — How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, this Thursday, at 7pm, in the Langdell North Classroom in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard.

The book is going to be a big bestseller, and Steve is a wonderful, funny presenter. (You can see a preview of the book in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine.)

Help a busted Mac?

My daughter's friend's Powerbook crashed after she downloaded an episode of "Gilmore Girls." Now it won't boot, and reports that there's nothing on the hard disk. She needs to turn in a paper on the drive on Monday. Any advice? In fact, if you're in Boston, wanna fix it for her...?

The spit fight that ended my career at MSNBC

It's an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It's possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They're nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But...

They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — "Nothing out of the mainstream," the producer told me yesterday — say about a "major" topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere's reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn't a job I'm comfortable with.

What makes the blogosphere interesting to me is not that there are moderate left and right voices talking about mainstream topics. Mainstream major stories are about issues such as freakish celebrity pedophiles, a spit match over a fight from 30 years ago that the press is hoping to revive, and whatever unfortunate child has been reported missing and presumed (better for the story) murdered. I'm in the blogosphere to escape from this degradation of values.

In the ninety seconds MSNBC gives over to blogging, they want to pair A-Listers into a he-said/she-said report on a Major Topic. Yippee for the A-Team! You do two of those and the last of the three segments should be something "fun," i.e., humorous and trivial because the news no longer knows how to operate without a closing joke. It's downright pathological.

I have mixed feelings. I'm genuinely glad Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, and others are doing it. It's better that they get to squeeze a few new voices into the MSM, even if those voices aren't always as diverse as we'd like. It's good for the MSM to acknowledge their viewers aren't passive. And people who follow the URLs may find other voices worth listening to. The odd thing is that the two I did for them (1 2) didn't follow the pattern they want, but they were happy with them nonetheless, so I probably could have kept on if I hadn't raised the issue. But I just couldn't face implicitly confirming the idea that the blogosphere consists of big voices arguing with one another — spit fights! — instead of 10 million real voices engaged in every variety of human conversation and delight.

So, fuck it. I quit. [Technorati tags: msnbc msm media]

April 23, 2005: There are some things I didn't express well in the post above. Thankfully, the blogosphere is so damn conversational that it doesn't take long for at least some of the weaknesses to come out. So, sorry for the bad writing, and here are some things I should have said.

I should have concluded my second paragraph by noting that after I said that I didn't think this was going to work out, we continued our amicable conversation and found three topics -- two of which I'd suggested, one of which they did -- for my segment. It was definitely not an "I quit!" and stalk out moment. The two producers were both great to work with and treated me well. I like them both.

Jay Rosen, ever sensitive to nuance, wonders why I used the word "quit" in my last sentence, instead of "stop." The answer is that I was instilling the episode with false drama, as a type of self-aggrandizement. That's a disservice to truth and I apologize. My word choice throughout the piece also reflects some anger, some of which is directed at [Warning: Generalization ahead] the MSM's laughably corrupt values but some of which is born of my own disappointment at not getting to be on TV any more. It's complex.

And speaking of complexity, Jeff Jarvis does a great job teasing apart the skein of ideas and emotions here and here.

Fever dreams

Because of my flu — today it's turned into merely a seal-like cough and Quasimodo's headache — I've been waking up with odd snippets of dreams in my head.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream in which the contestants on American Idol were catching fish shaped like the way they sing. So, the one who does all the Mariah Carey-esque swooping around every note reeled in an eel. Disgusting, but, then...

Yesterday I woke up with this bad joke from the early 1990s:

Why exactly I'm having Ross Perot dreams is beyond me. (And I'd clean up the awful red outlining but I'm too beat. It's not like it'd be real funny if only I'd done a better job image editing it.)

Audible RSS

Thanks to work and prodding by Mitch Ratcliffe, Audible is now on the RSS bandwagon. You can subscribe to a feed of their bestsellers, NY Times Bestsellers, free audio, and lots more... [Technorati tags: audible rss MitchRatcliffe]

MSNBC presentation

This is the bit I memorized for today's 90 seconds on MSNBC. It should be pretty close to what I actually said, short of the epithet's I involuntarily barked out. (PoliticalTeen has captured the video. Thanks!)

BlackFive, a right wing military blog, is running a list of about 80 blogs by military personnel. It's quite a collection. At the National Guard Experience, a mortar infantryman stationed in Afghanistan runs lots of photos of children, and seems, mildly obsessed with care packages. At Jack Army, a special forces soldier tells us why he flunked out of Medic training. A good read. Soldiers Mom, says that her son's division in Iraq has entered a communications blackout period, which often means there's some bad news coming. I hope not. By the way, the Army Times itself last month ran a list of military blogs, so they're becoming more mainstream.

Some bloggers have been talking about a cache of 400,000 documents discovered a hundred years ago in Egypt that's now legible thanks to new technology They've already found lost works by Sophocles and Euripides, and there's speculation there maybe even be a lost gospel in there. The blogger, Eyeless in Gaza, explains the documents were trash dumped on the outskirts of the town, which was far enough from the Nile that the trash stayed nice and dry. It's apparently an amazing store of riches that'll take years to explore.

Finally, Jeremy Stribling, a student at MIT, felt that an academic conference was spamming him, so he generated a gibberish paper…which was, of course, then accepted. If you want to generate your own gibberish academic paper, you can go to Jeremy's site. [Technorati tags: oxyrhynchus stribling iraq]

Blogline categories

Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Great idea. First results: A list of the 100 most popular categories. It shows the gap between the categories we use for ourselves and those we use for others. I have a category called "Web" for entries in this blog because within the confines of my blog, it's a useful way of sorting posts. But tagging a post "web" for retrieval within the wide world of resources would be pointless. We're either going to get more sophisticated in how we tag, or our computers are going to have to get ever more clever about reading lots of implicit and metadata to help us find what we're looking for. Or both.

Betsy's great-grandblogger

Betsy runs snippets from the daily letters her great-grandfather wrote to his family. Charming.

In a separate post, she reports that one of the t-shirts for sale at a scientific meeting she went to reads:

PLEASE FLIRT HARDER, I AM A PHYSICIST

Me on MSNBC today

I'm jarvising on MSNBC todayt at 5:20 EDT, assuming I can shake myself clear of this awful cold-flu-y thing for 90 seconds... [Technorati tag: msnbc]

Success by puns

Just as we knew blogging was succeeding because of the hundred different plays on the word, "folksonomy" is now spawning its own, including "fauxonomy," a phrase used by Tom Coates and used in The Daily Chump's tagline, so to speak. (I myself am guilty of the highly forced "folksongnomic.") [Technorati tags: folksonomy fauxonomy]

A backlash

Graeme Thickens, in a de-hyping mood, gives ten reasons why businesses won't blog. I agree that business has been slow to pick up on blogs, but I find too many of his reasons unconvincing. For example:

"Businesses don't do passion." True, but employees do. And employees, not businesses. write blogs.

"Business doesn't like gossip." So now we know which types of blogs Graeme's been reading :)

"Businesses already communicate well in various ways." Puhlease! Businesses can barely croak out intelligible phrases. Have you heard an executive talk recently? Or a marketer? That's maybe the biggest reason why businesses ought to blog: Employees get to talk like humans.

"Business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close." See above.

Other of his points make more sense to me. I agree that companies don't like to do public experiments and blogs take time without providing an easy-to-measure ROI. And companies do need reassurance that they can have some measure of control over what gets blogged on their site: They can set up policies and editors.

But Graeme, I think, misses two points. First, blogs are more likely, IMO, to show up internally. As project groups come to rely on blogs as a great way of communicating and capturing their knowledge, companies will get more comfortable with outward-facing blogs. Second, Graeme ends by saying he's much more excited about word-of-mouth marketing. From my point of view, the companies who succeed at word-of-mouth marketing will do so by entering the blogging fray as equals. [Technorati tag: blogs]

Chinese tagging

Rebecca reports on the use of tagging by Chinese bloggers. Also, in response to a post by Joi Ito, "If you are posting something on your blog about Chinese-Japanese tensions, Sino-Japanese history debates, and related issues (or if you’re uploading related photos to the web)," she recommends you use the tag "cn_jp_dialog."

Also, GlobalVoices has a great post about Chinese bloggers managing to post about the anti-Japanese rallies even though they are not supposed to. (One of the main IM services blocks messages that contain the word "march," for example.) [Technorati tags: cn_jp_dialog tags globalvoices]

Melatonin anyone?

As I prepare to get on yet another plane — and I have a cold that has pushed me into the bottomless well of self-pity — I'm thinking about the three trips to Europe I'm making in the next couple of months. They're all red-eyes. I don't sleep well on planes. I have on occasion dosed myself with dramamine because it knocks me out without leaving much of a hangover. Some people I know swear by melatonin to reset the diurnal clock. I've never tried it. Any suggestions?

Alternatively, if you'd like to upgrade me to business class, I'd be happy to give up the drugs. It's your choice really. [Technorati tag: melatonin jetlag]

House of the Rising Sun explained

The Boston Phoenix this week runs an excerpt from Dave Van Ronk's memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street. The piece is about how Van Ronk lost control of his arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun, first to Dylan and then toThe Animals. Van Ronk was not on the Lessig side of the copyright battle. Anyway, I bring this up because Van Ronk ends by saying that late in life he discovered that the song isn't about a whore house. It's about the Orleans Parish women's prison.

Add it to the annals of busted folksongnomies. [Technorati tags: vanronk risingsun]

Million dollar idea and assorted crotchety whines

Carbonize some marshmallows and sell them as "Microwave Campfire Marshmallows." It's a surefire million dollar idea, assuming you figure out the marshmallows-explode-in-the-microwave part. But, you could probably just market your way around that: "Poppin' Fresh Microwave Campire Marshmallows (Caution: Be sure microwave door is securely closed.)"

And while I'm not on