I’m listening to Leon Dubosch via a translator. (German is my best not-English, but it’s not good enough.) Leonard thought about projects that could be done in Linz.
Thomas Gegenhuber now speaks. Art reuses what has been created before. (He quotes Lessig.) What can a municipality do? Linz’s homepage is published under CC. Artists who publish their works under a free license gets more money from the government than those who don’t use free licenses. CC here is the default option, and that should be true for cultural funding.
Jakob p[missed last name] says free software is a matter of rights Protecting free software is a human right. Munich uses platform-independent software. It’s free to adapt it, free to partner, free to disseminate it, and has no license fees to pay. What will Linz have to do to be as free Munich: Decide to use open source software in administration, the business, and in education. Right now, all software in Austrian schools is Windows. Instead, schools should teach skills, not applications. Schools ought to have open source software.
Barbara Hofmann talks open courseware. She points to MIT and open coune.rseware. There are 200 schools that are members of the open courseware consortium. The Univ of Klagenfurt in Austria is a member. It takes institutional interest and organizational backbone.
Stefan Powel talks about web science at Univ of Linz. They want to pull together multiple disciplines, initially for a masters degree, by 2010. Bachelors degree by 2012.
Manuela Hiermair talks about overcoming the digital divide. We need free wifi. Communities can provide free access. In Linz, there are over 100 free wifi access points, and a public internet service provider.
Christian Forsterleitner talks about Digital public space. Every resident should receive a bit of Linz’s publis space, free. There are free storage offers from Google, Flickr, MySpace, etc. NBut you give up your rights and are subject to censorship. “We want public authorities to provide this basic service.” “We consider the Webspace to be a citizen’s right.”
[Time to move to Linz? :) ]
Michael Tiemann tells us a little of his story. He once wrote some software and sold it to a company that was unable to market it. He was torn up that his work would never be used because it was owned and locked up by someone else. The music industry also doesn’t work well for musicians. So, he’s begun a personal project to create a new way to solve this problem. [Note: Live blogging. Unreliably.]
He shows a video of a beautifully rendered http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/hobbyprincess/2005/03/draft_craft_man.html music studio.
“Culture” comes from “cultivate.” Culture isn’t just about consumption, but about the processes that produce goods and that give them meaning. We need to preserve our creative topsoil. Trying to own culture kills it.
Now he talks about his project. He refers to The Crafter Manifesto. He quotes Tagore: “One man opens his throat to sing/ the other sings in his mind.” The song needs the listener. And the observer alters the reality observed. So, look at the slow food music. Why can’t we do the same thing for music, he asks. The artist, the engineer, and the audience (which he calls “the co-producers”) are in an collaborative project.
His project aims at creating an environment with superb sound, inviting co-producers in so they can participate much more fully. (now I’m confused. I’m not sure if he’s building a real or virtual. I’m pretty sure it’s virtual.) There will be a subscription model.
Damn. I just irretrievably lost my entire post on Tim Pritlove’s presentation. That’s really annoying.
So, in the three minutes before the next presentation: Tim is a hacker and founder of the Chaos Computer Club. Hackers are artists he says, and artists are hackers. Hackers don’t try to break in. Rather, they break things, to see how they work.
He talked about the Blinkenlight project that uses buildings as pixel displays. Very cool. Totally open sourced and Creative Commonsed. What’s displayed is also opened to the public.
Yochai says he wants to leave the question: Can free culture survive systematization? [Trying to keep up with Yochai. Failing. Posting without proofreading or spell checking. Caveat lector.]
In 1835, it cost $10K (modern dollars) to start a daily newspaper. Now it costs millions. The startup cost causes a bifurcation between passive audiences and professional, commercial producers. The industrial structure of mass media characterizes the modern age. But, consider that SET@Home dwarfs the computing power of the supercomputers created in industrial ways. This is a radical decentralization of inputs and processes: material, processing, storage, communication, creativity, wisdom. For the first time, the most important inputs are broadly distributed in the population.
This takes social action that’s always been there, and moves it from being important socially and peripheral to the economy, to being at the core.
In Wikipedia vs. Britannica, the core issue isn’t price. It’s authority. The most important part of the Nature comparative study of the two was the editorial that urged scientists to update Wikipedia, sharing traditional authority with the new medium.
Yochai shows a 2×2: centralize or decentraliced vs market-based and non-market. Now we have a four-way interaction among all the old players, from traditional to social-sharing non-profits.
This engages distributed sensing of opportunities for action, solutions, experimentatino, adaptation. You get new and exciting possibilities. The increasing complexity and speed of change has been pushing businesses to go beyond the old technique of hiring what they need. “We can learn faster by loosening the structure of who gets to be effectively active in the world.”
But Yochai wants to focus on participatory culture and democracy. “Critical to the success and power of social production … is the decentralization of practical capacity to act…but also locating authority to act where the capacity to act resides.” This is where commons-based resources are important: We can act on them without permission. This is also where peer production systems (people cooperating without firms) matter because it allows people to work together without permission. “Ownership no longer equals or entails authority.” We get a more diverse , more transparent, and maybe a more critical self-reflective culture (although here he leaves a question mark).
Yochai shows a kickass video of a guy in a suit figuring out how to play the drums, followed by another guy in a split screen plahing piano. By someone named Lasse something? If you have the url, could you post it in the comments? He tells the story of the Daily Prophet, a 14 yr old who poste Harry Potter stories, and seven years later has started a distributed projeto t scan in fantasy illustrations from old books. Also, the site Learning To Love You More’s project of collecting photos of bed underneaths. Also, wikileaks.org. Also, Porkbusters.org. And Sunlightfoundation.com And distributed reportage (”Bomb bomb bomb, Iran”). “Yes We Can.”
YouTube lets individuals create and post. Revver and Metacafe tries to find ways to get artists paid. But, “once they introduced money, they introduced distrust.” Kaltura enables editing and has worked on engendering trust via open sourcing. Everything will be kept free. It binds its organization to a set of institutions that are free and open.
Politics isn’t just about politicians. It’s also about meaning. What things mean and how they mean.
So, human creativity decentralized can create a more democratic system, but it threatens the industrial model. For the past decade there’s been a rough stalemate over IP. But the most important actions have been social/cultural: Sharing practices. Increasingly institutionalized, e.g., Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons.
We’re seeing new models of market-cultural society relations: Credible commitment mechanisms, self-binding licenses, transparency, participation, styles of leadership. Authenticity and conversation become central. New ways to build trust, fairness, reciprocity.
He ends by taking Jonathan Coulton as an example. [What about Brad Sucks? :) ] He shows the Code Monkey videos.
“This is invoking a fundamentally different normative framework than ‘This is mine and you can’t have it.’”
The basic question: Can we create new social cultural spaces in the overlap of market and social relations, sustainable and not based on control and authority but on social and cooperative models?
Ars Electronica is a festival with a conference embedded in it as one of dozens of tracks. It’s held in Linz, Austria, a beautiful city on Danube. Artists, geeks, academics and others gather, this year to discuss “A New Cultural Economy.” [Note: I am live-blogging, writing badly, making mistakes, missing stuff, and just generally going wrong. The conference is streamed, I believe]
This morning, Joi Ito, the conference “curator,” welcomes us. He talks about AE’s valuing of artists as those who (especially in Europe, he says) push technology forward by imagining uses. He shows a stack: Ethernet (computers), Internet (network), Web (content), and knowledge (Creative Commons). It took ten years to generate enough user-created content to be worth searching for, he says. But now we’re there. But we need to unlock the knowledge we’ve created via tech, open licensing, and the Semantic Web. We need to get past the copyright holders vs. the pirates bifurcation. We need to look at nuance and at the hybrid projects. And that’s what we’re going to do at AE, he says.
He argues against the idea that amateur vs. professional means good vs. excellent. Amateurs have access to high-quality tools and do what they do out of love. How do we adapt our culture, economy and government to adapt to a generation that would rather produce and remix than consume?
[This is a very rough overview of Joi's remarks.]
You can read it here. There are many things in it with which I agree. Even so, it is arguably the most right-wing platform in our history.
I missed John McCain’s speech entirely, since he was rude enough to give it at 4AM in Austrian time (I’m at the Ars Electronica festival), but I had a good laugh when I woke up and checked the coverage: The headline in the NY Times is:
John McCain Vows to End ‘Partisan Rancor’
Of all the themes to pick after the intensely partisan ads and speeches, and the night after nominating a self-described “pitbull in lipstick”! I do appreciate McCain’s gracious ad congratulating Obama on his nomination, but even that ad noted that it was a momentary lull (”We’ll be at it again tomorrow”) in a firestorm of partisan negativity.
Maybe the headline was just due to the Times’ impish sense of humor.
(With apologies to Melville) The Wall Street Journal notes a career-enhancing moment by an executive at Carat International, who sent an e-mail with confidential information about restructuring (= large-scale firings) to the entire firm, rather than the (more limited) intended recipients. Fortunately, Carat’s IT department managed to “pull back” the message (known to geeks as “if unread, then retract”; when I worked at Lotus, this was among the most-requested feature additions by customers, and they’ve finally added it). Unfortunately, AdAge.com got a copy and published it.
This isn’t the first such goof. In fact, a classmate of mine accidentally sent his tale of summer associate leisure to a ream of his colleagues at Skadden Arps rather than just his friend. (It worked out fine for him, but one can only imagine the adrenaline shot on realizing the goof.) It reinforces that information is exceedingly slippery in an age of digital networked communication.
The WSJ writer, Sarah Needleman, proposes some technical ways of providing the pause that refreshes (or causes reflection) - essentially, having one’s e-mail client ask “Are ya sure?” before doing Reply to All or sending to a mailing list. There are two potential problems here. The big one is that people will immediately try to turn off this annoying feature. (Think about Vista’s user account controls.) No one likes it when Notes or Outlook acts like your mom. The second is that such a feature needs to display more information in order to be valuable. If it just asks “Do you want to send to all?”, the answer is, “Of course! That’s why I clicked Send!” The feature ought, therefore, to list all of the recipients when it nags you. There are technical reasons why this might not work - imagine if it’s a mailing list, or if the client is offline and doesn’t have the ability to expand a group into a list - and people are likely just to click past the warning anyway.
Speed is the antithesis of reflection. The brilliance and challenge of e-mail is that it enables near-instantaneous communication. We tend to write things we shouldn’t, and to send them to people we shouldn’t.
So, what if we used technology to force a period of reflection? What if your client let you impose a “cooling-off period” - such that it placed every sent mail in an Outbox, and then sent it after a period of time that you determined via configuration settings? (This works similarly to how mail clients such as Notes and Thunderbird handle things when you send mail when not connected to the Internet.) What if your company made a 60-minute cooling-off period mandatory? Or should we just let instances like this act as cautionary tales, changing perhaps our internal norms but not our mail clients?
From The Long When:
| Either we get green or our layer of the lithosphere wraps early. We have to learn to respect a scope of time that geologists and too few others even begin to conceive. That’s why I love what the Long Now folks are trying to do. Our species has been operating on a free lunch program for the duration. We’re a start-up species, exploiting everything we found when we came here, and giving back approximately nothing. If we don’t come back from lunch pretty soon, lunch is what we’ll be. |
Wrote that 7.5 years ago.
(From my Blackberry. Pls forgive the typos and abbrevs.)
I watched the Rep conv from my hotel room in Norway. It was 4:30 am when Polin came on. I saw ten mins, enough to see that she’d become a cultural stand-in. She is now not what she is but a symbol in our ugly, perpetual cultural war. (As Jay Rosen has said.)
Then I had to get into a cab, so I watched the rest via twitter on my phone. Fascinating. A play that consisted solely of reactions. The O fans were reacting to her content, as if this weren’t about the Reps hatred of the media and distrust of intellectuals. (And, yes, I believe there’s some racial stuff going on as well, at the archetpal level. What do I mean? Even if I knew, I couldn’t type it on a bberry.)
I experienced the conv in another alienated way: Among Europeans, to whom SP looks like the ultimate US joke on itself. We make a B movie star into a prez, and now we tell ourselves that absolutely anyone can be president. You’re a model citizen? Great, go bring peace to the Mideast. Oh, and here are the launch keys.
But I hope the O campaign continues to steer clear of attacks on SP. That’s the cultural war game the Reps are playing. Instead point out that the Rep ticket is now more conservative than Bush or Goldwater. Stick to the issues. Let the bloggers surface the cracks in SP’s pose…
Well, I guess I’ll press the Send button, athough a jetlagged, frightened person typing on a bberry should never be allowed to post…
I haven’t been able to view the video, but the write-up of this Jon Stewart segment on the hypocrisy of Rove, O’Reilly, and Dick Morris makes it sound quite satisfying to those of a certain ilk.
I love Dave Barry. A couple of random paragraphs:
| The Democrats pounced immediately on the choice of Palin, charging that she is unqualified, especially compared to the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who have a total of nearly 40 years of experience in the U.S. Senate, or, if you subtract Biden, nearly four years of experience. |
| But the McCain camp is defending Palin’s résumé, which, aside from being a governor and a mayor, includes being a mom, playing basketball, hunting moose and being runner-up for Miss Alaska 1984. There was some grumbling among Republican insiders that McCain would have been better off choosing somebody with a thicker résumé, such as Mitt Romney, who actually won Miss Alaska 1984. |
But seriously, it’s disappointing to see the GOP present itself as the War Party. The most sensible Republican I heard tonight was Ron Paul, talking to Tavis Smiley on the motel TV. The least sensible was Rudy Giuliani, whose mockery of Obama’s work as a community organizer pissed me off. I was once a community organizer. I wasn’t very good at it, but I developed enormous respect for those who were. It’s good, hard and important work.
Obama is still doing it. And he’ll need to do a lot more if he’s going to win in November.
Between now and then it’ll be high road vs. low road. Hate to say I’m betting on the latter.
“We need solar power as cheap as paint, and a way to store it.” Overheard in conversation today. Just wanted to get it down.
I’m sorry to say that I think Jay Rosen’s analysis of how the Sarah Palin candidacy will be played by the media, and how the media will be played by the Republicans, is right on the money.
Very cool news this morning: the latest version of Picasa Web Albums now, like Flickr, supports Creative Commons licenses.
RealClear Politics has an electoral map that shows you who’s leading where. You can also use it to create your own map.
I really enjoyed BioShock, and think that it took computer games an evolutionary step forward (well, if evolution had a direction). I thus was prepped to like this postmortem on the design of the game. Very interesting, and quite frank. No mention, though, of the disappointing ending of the game.
The Slashdot discussion of the article is almost entirely about BioShock’s famously onerous DRM, which the postmortem article doesn’t mention.
(The postmortem points to a fabulous downloadable collection of art from the game.)
Beginning by disagreeing with me — always a good way to start! — Lev at Certain Musings has a useful post about the difficulty of preserving the texts we care about, including some of the interesting efforts underway.
The Bigger Switch is my Linux Journal column on Nick Carr’s The Big Switch. It concludes:
| I don’t see utopian ideals behind what Alvin Toffler called the Information Age (in The Third Wave, which came out in 1980). Rather, I see practical ones, modeled on the construction industry, complete with “architects”, “designers” and “builders”. The difference is in the materials. In the physical world, we are bound by the laws of physics and the periodic table. In the networked world, we are bound by what the human mind can produce. We have no equivalents of rock and wood, because our raw materials are far less limited and far more abundant than both. This creates new problems and opportunities in equal profusion. |
| But, for better and worse, the source is us. |
Bonus link: Nick on Google’s Chrome browser.
As many of you know, I'm on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. The goal of this commission is to assess the information needs for local communities (in relation to democracy) and determine how to best achieve them. This involves the intersection of old and new media, grassroots action and government intervention, technology, education, and policy. For more details, check out some background info.
We are hosting a series of public forums. The first will take place in Silicon Valley on September 8. Details are here. I know many of you live in or near the SV so I thought you should know about said meeting. Anyone is welcome, although you need to RSVP by September 5. For those unable to attend, it will be webcast live and recordings will be available.
I'm sure that it'll be interesting, especially for those of you who are fascinated by journalism, information dissemination, creating a healthy political public, etc. Personally, I've been loving the private discussions we've been having and I look forward to this next meeting. So I hope to see some of you next week!
information public democracy media politics"In Africa people are much more attuned to blogs than you'd think." Ethan Zuckerman just said that. (You might remember Ethan from GeekCorps.) It's one quotable line among a cascade of them. And he hasn't even gotten around to the remarkable Eric Osiakwan yet. Both are talking about The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, the topic of today's luncheon at the Berkman Center. It's being streamed live, and it's so different from the usual geek fare — yet both geeky and extremely important for both Kenya and Africa.
British humorist Stephen Fry has produced a video to mark the 25th Anniversary of RMS's launch of the GNU operating system. Watch and celebrate here.
This is an extraordinary milestone to mark. I'll keep a list of celebratory videos here (email me with any links). Congratulations to Richard on the success of this movement launched as an idea 25 years ago (September 27 is the date), and more importantly, thank you to Richard for this movement launched as an idea 25 years ago.
Technorati Tags: Conferences, FTTH, Picnic08, USLosingLead
Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics posts a long post comparing the science policies of Obama and McCain, including Obama’s answers to the excellent 14 science questions posed to both of the candidates; McCain has not answered yet, but he has said that he will. She does not find herself torn. (Neither do I.)
Technorati Tags: Environment, Hurricane
I fly a lot, and I’m delayed a lot, including now, sitting in the terminal at Santa Barbara (waiting to take a redeye that will land me in Boston at dawn tomorrow). So I’ll take a few minutes to share some of what I’ve learned along the way.
First, dig FlightAware. Not the best UI, but a very handy resource. It was via FlightAware that I found that my plane wasn’t only “delayed” (as the board said at the airport), but that the plane that would become my Denver flight was still on the ground in San Francisco, and would be an hour and thirty-seven munutes late taking off. Since I only had an hour layover in Denver, I had to seek alternatives.
Second, SeatGuru and SeatExpert. Since the Long Tail fills in blanks that the airlines miss, I was able to get a seat with extra legroom on the United Airbus 320 I’ll be taking tonight.
Third, if you’re waiting on line, call the airline and get business out of the way while you’re idle. I was able to do that in this case, and it was a merciful break for the passengers queued up behind me.
Fourth, dig AviationWeather.gov. All the links are interesting and rich with informative maps. There’s even a space weather link. Handy if there’s an aurora going on and you’re flying a route within sight of a magnetic pole. Here’s an example, complete with Space Weaher screen shots.
| …the choice of Sarah Palin as their vice presidential candidate reflects their expert understanding of the political mind and political marketing. Democrats who simply belittle the Palin choice are courting disaster. It must be taken with the utmost seriousness… |
| …the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been to try to keep the focus on external realities, the “issues,” and differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call “issues,” but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind — the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Republicans can’t win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism, activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that conservatives have in dominating political discourse. |
Either it’s nuts or political jujistu of the first water. And even if it’s the former, it could turn into the latter. Obama and the dems can’t wonk their way to victory, even if that’s their nature. (And it is.)
(Note: this post was made mistakenly as a page, and didn’t go up at first. Now it’s here. Thanks to commenters for the help.)
I’ve flown over these coal mines in New Mexico and Arizona many times, but never checked to see what was up with them. Or down. Or choose your direction.
Turns out the one above, a giant W in the Arizona landscape, is the Black Mesa Mine, and it has been mothballed since 2005 when the destination of its coal (via an unusual route), the Mojave power plant, was shut down. The Kayenta Mine is still running, as are the other mines I saw off to the east around the Four Corners areas.
I’m flying back to Boston today. Weather looks bad for shooting over the West. It’ll be dark over the rest of the trip anyway, though sometimes I get some good city shots at night.
Flying out here on the 19th, I sat on the sunny side of the plane, which never makes for good shooting, but I still got some decent shots of Gloucester Bay, Mt. Blanca in Colorado’s Sagre de Cristo range, Great Sand Dunes National Park, center-fed farms (such as the one above) in the San Luis Valley, the San Juan River running through a hogback, Shiprock, the painted desert, the Black Mesa Mine, the Kayenta Mine, the Grand Canyon, salt evaporators, Mt. San Jacinto, Mt. San Gorgonio, mountains of coastal southern California and Los Angeles freeways. Some are good. Enjoy.
| That challenge, legal experts say, is one of several for trademark policy and practice in the Internet age. Instant communication, aggressive business tactics and an unsettled legal environment, they say, mean that trademark disputes on the Internet will increase in number and intensity... |
| The new areas of conflict, according to legal experts, include trademark owners trying to assert their rights to stifle online criticism of their products, and to stop trademarked brands from being purchased as keywords in Internet search advertising. |
For example, live mesh.
Comcast, which has amazingly bad PR chops, has done it again. Comcast to Place a Cap on Internet Downloads, headlines the NYTimes story. An excerpt:
| Until now, Comcast had not defined excessive use, but it had contacted customers who were using the heaviest amount of broadband and asked them to curb usage. Most do so willingly, the company said. The ones who do not curb their usage receive a second notice and risk having their accounts terminated. |
| Although the 250 gigabyte cap is now specified, users who exceed that amount will not have their access switched off immediately, nor will they be charged for excessive use. Instead, the customers may be contacted by Comcast and notified of the cap. The company did not say how 250 gigabytes was selected. |
| According to Comcast, a customer would have to download 62,500 songs or 125 standard-definition movies a month to exceed the caps, |
So then, why bother? Why give customers one more reason not to use Comcast?
For what it’s worth, at our apartment near Boston I have a choice of Comcast, RCN and Verizon FiOS. I use FiOS because I get 20Mb of symmetrical service from a fiber optic line to the house, minimal technical restriction (they block port 80, but so does everybody) and rock-solid service. Far as I know Verizon doesn’t care how much data moves in either direction from my house. Comcast doesn’t compete with that. At least not yet.
All they did with this move is give me one more reason not to switch.
Maybe one of ya’ll can explain to me why this post I put up last night does not appear in the blog. Nor does it appear among my list of posts in the WordPress admin dashboard. Yet clearly it exists. Strange.
Wow am I behind on blogging. A month or so ago I was part of a “new media brain trust” at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. Other than a trip to Morocco in the early 90s I’ve never traveled to Africa and had been hoping to some day, and now hope to again soon.
This trip was part of the New Media Institute (NMI), an evolving project of the National Black Programming Consortium, one of public television’s five minority production centers. NMI is becoming a real nexus of training, discussion and networking for minority multimedia producers here in the U.S. and now also in Africa (see short overview video at the end of the post). PRX has looked for ways to partner with NBPC (most recently on their Masculinity Project) and joined in several NMI sessions in Boston and Jackson, MI. So I was thrilled to be invited to join the Zanzibar voyage.
Stone Town is a maze
The workshop itself was a two-day conversation (in English, with a bit of Swahili) with 40 or so participants on public service media’s transition to a digital age in both North America and Africa. The focus was on how Africa could use new media to tell stories in a new way, to connect to each other within and between countries on the continent, and to reach beyond on a global scale. Although the majority of the African attendees were broadcasters of one kind or another, the workshop started off with a blogger panel featuring Kenyan blogger Daudi Were and Tanzanian blogger Issa Michuzi who really set the pace for the rest of the discussion. Daudi talked about the complicated role of blogs and SMS in the turbulent aftermath of the recent Kenyan elections and drove home the theme of a power shift in media authority.
Later panels such as “All Politics is Local, All Conflict is Global” and “The Online Space and the Marginalized Voice” took us further into discussion of the tension between institutions and individuals as media roles start to shift. In particular the story of SMS during the post-election violence in Kenya was striking. The viral and direct potential of misinformation or incitement via SMS when mass media is unreliable or unavailable is leading to a new law banning the use of messaging that targets people by ethnicity no matter what the cause. On my panel I talked about PRX, a bit on the long tail (complete with self-serving segue to my rock star status in South Korea), and how U.S. public media is handling the transition to digital.
Wambui Mwangi and Jake Shapiro
Feeling like we’d only scratched the surface, it was already time to head home but not without a trip around the island, catching some time at a spice farm, a spectacular beach on the eastern shore (and my first swim in the Indian Ocean), a visit with the endangered Red Colobus Monkey (I got some video of a funny encounter here on YouTube), and even a chance to jam on guitar with a Tanzanian reggae band.
I was profoundly grateful for the chance to visit Zanzibar and in such a provocative way - would that all introductions to new places mix in a film and music festival, an intensive workshop, and a taste of five different flavors from a cinnamon tree.
I’ve mainly and only haphazardly followed a variety of African developments through Global Voices and my friend and fellow Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman’s outstanding blog My Heart’s in Accra. Thinking about Ethan’s post “Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia” brought home again the simple realization that in part drove my interest in this trip to begin with: being there matters, being there changes something. It’s not one single thing, like breathing the distinctive air or the huge distance traveled, but the complete experience of being in a place has the ability to connect you with it and with people there in a way that even powerful stories - never mind news reports - can’t match. Kind of obvious, I know. Of course, this approach doesn’t scale to meet Ethan’s goal of bridging the global empathy and attention gap, but perhaps there is a strategy that makes the most of folks who serendipitously get inspired through a trip like NMI Zanzibar. I’m an aspiring xenophile.
Here’s a short video overview of NMI: Mississippi:
A little guide to New Orleans radio & other Hurricane Gustav sources.
If you’re using a regular over-the-air-type radio, and you’re within 750 miles or so of New Orleans, tune in 870am to hear WWL. It’s one of the original (literal) clear channel stations. In the old days you’d get them from coast to coast at night, but in recent years the FCC has chosen to allow new stations to clutter the AM band at night (when signals skip off the ionosphere). But still, worth a check if you’re within range. WWL also has a hurricane coverage network of other stations in the area.
If you’re listening over the Net, your station choices are WWL and WIST. Here’s a link to a browser thingie that plays WWL (using Windows Media or Silverlight). Here’s WIST’s audio page. Wish either used .mp3, but this isn’t the right time to complain. Both have excellent local coverage right now, from what I can gather. Lots of listener call-in stuff.
Can’t get Technorati to chart less than 90 days, but this chart shows Gustav action.
Full Circle’s Tracking Hurricane Gustav on Social Media.
Rex Hammock’s Where to go for Gustav information. Includes the Gustav Information Center, Nola.com, Wikipedia’s Gustav entry, GustavWiki.
I’ll add more as the night goes on.
American Red Cross Flickr photos. Those with “Hurricane Gustav” tags. All photos with hurricanegustav tags.
Andy Carvin wants to make the ultimate Gustav mashup map.
See the comments below for more.
Zogby reports that McCain’s insulting selection of Sarah Palin has given his campaign a bounce back up to equivalency with Obama’s. But Slate reports that Obama continues to lead in the right states, so that his electoral count remains strong.
I do not understand America. Seriously. Never have. Apparently I never will.
I listened to McCain’s veep selection live on the radio. Struck me as pretty smart, though maybe a little too smart for McCain’s own good. His attacks on Obama’s lack of experience ring kinda hollow after he’s picked a backup president (which is all a veep is, Cheney excepted) with even less experience. Since then I’ve read a few blogs and stuff, and pretty much steered clear of politics while enjoying freedom from media and technology during my last few days at home with family and friends in Santa Barbara. Anyway at this point I’d say my take on Sarah Palin kinda parallels Richard Bennett’s:
| She’s young, good-looking, inexperienced, a bit ideological, and a member of a marginal group; just like Barack Obama, actually. But she’s running for VP, not to be the big dog. She’s not at all embarrassing, not a Katherine Harris, Harriet Miers, or Dan Quayle. All in all, a good contrast to Biden who’s tainted with the scent of corruption. |
| This just might work for McCain. |
| UPDATE: But seriously, what was McCain thinking? Palin is a nice woman, but there’s no way in hell she should be allowed inside the White House if not on a tour. McCain has effectively conceded the election. Welcome to the Oval Office, President Obama, listen to Sen. Biden carefully and don’t screw too many things up. |
FWIW, she’s got some taint too.
Also FWIW, I know a lot of Hillary partisans, and if anything the Palin selection helps them rationalize voting for Obama.
Looking forward to the debate between Palin and Biden.
The Washington Post has a great piece about the InfoWar Monitor project, including interviews with my former ONI colleagues Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski. Cyberwar is a new, murky, and fascinating zone of interstate conflict. Most interestingly, it’s one where combat is outsourced: hackers and denial of service attacks can come from volunteers and on-line fellow travelers as easily as from military computer labs or intelligence services. InfoWar Monitor is a civilian effort to track, study, and report on this new arena of combat. Like Internet filtering, cyberwar is difficult to detect and even harder to allocate accountability for. The recent conflict between Russia and Georgia, and previous attacks in Belarus, show how central the Internet is becoming to contests between and within countries. Stay tuned.
Sarah Palin seems to be an upstanding citizen. A model citizen, even. She’s worked hard, she’s fought some entrenched interests, she’s taken the initiative, she’s maintained her values…all while raising what seems to be a fine family. Welcome to the national stage.
I only put in the weasel “seems” word because I know so little about her. So: She also seems to be the least qualified vice presidential candidate in modern history. Her lack of preparation to assume the office of the presidency shows an abysmal lack of judgment on John McCain’s part, and a reckless putting of his campaign ahead of his country.
The Wikipedia the Sarah Palin entry is informative, but the discussion page is and even better source of information…the best source of info on her I’ve seen so far.
Two weeks ago, Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family put out a light-hearted video urging McCain supporters to pray that there be a sudden burst of rain just as Obama came on stage for his outdoor acceptance speech.
I took him up on it, suggesting that we take the presence or absence of rain as a sign of divine political preference.
It was a beautiful, clear night in Denver.
That should be enough to settle the issue. But, just in case there were any lingering doubts, it looks like the higher power will unleash upon the Republican convention a torrential rain.
Case closed.
We have a MacBook Pro in need of a device driver that will make a GT Ultra Express data card work. The card is made by Option. Documents here show it working on the laptop. The 4th and last AT&T person we spoke to (escalating up through the call center ranks) said that Apple provides the device driver, and that it should come with the machine. But it doesn’t. Not that we can tell. (A borrowed Sprint card works fine, for what that’s worth.) Apple’s site offers no clues we can find. Option’s wants us to enter the SNR and EMEI numbers before help moves forward, but when we do a login failure results.
Clues?
From BoingBoing:
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin’. It works pretty damned well, too.
Sure, you’ll miss some worthy comments that happen to be misspelled or contain some bad language. But in an age of abundance, you’ll find plenty of other worthy comments to read.
If the presidential election ends in a tie, as it kind of did in 2000, I suggest settling it with a game of one-on-one basketball between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
Why does Facebook bother with a “remember me” checkbox when it never does?
Related: I now have 212 friend request, 3 friend suggestions, 6 event invitations, 1 music invitation and 190 “other requests”. Saying this is too much doesn’t cover it.
I hope I’ve piqued your interest with all of the Herdict buzz. You’re excited, perhaps, waiting with bated breath for the next installment of Herdict blogging. You’re raring and ready to participate. Or perhaps you’re simply wondering, “What can Herdict do for me?”
As you know, you can do a lot for Herdict. Your input and your submissions are what drive the herd. Without you, Herdict would simply cease to exist, starved of data. But, as with any good relationship, Herdict needs to give something back to you…
Herdict does this by provi
