Slowly but surely the new heavyweight is finding his bearings, refining his technique, learning to dance and gaining in strength. Can a swarm float like a butterfly and sting like a bee? I sure think it can.
The bell rung and :
Over the last couple of weeks a process that was formerly hidden became visible, as the powers of television, radio and print decide which candidate they want to run against George Bush in the fall.
The last half of the 20th Century was an excessive monoculture, centralized thinking system, where we think, as Citizen Kane snapped"What I tell them to think!" The American news executives who deleted the Dean candidacy through misinformation should do as the leadership of the BBC did -- resign and make way for an overdue reformation of journalism, and as a result the American political system. It's time. As Lydon tells us, the corruption isn't new. What's new is that it's visible now that we can inform each other without relying on them.
The "process that was formerly hidden" is propaganda institutionalized as (most) journalism, marketing and entertainment: cultural fascism, exploiting irrational fears and base desires.
Are you ready to rumble?
Classnotes Wiki
Way to go! It'll be fun to watch this develop... and spread...
Collapsing
We have relationships with every person we meet/know.
We have relationship networks which connect all these people to us and to each other.
We manage relationships by being nodes and establishing identities (identity facets).
So if we think of ourseleves as a node in a network... Liken the node to an atom. The atom has neutrons and protons... The node has facets...
We can be multinodes in multiple neworks, each node with multiple facets.
Interesting idea came up tonight in . Do networks have a tendency to draw unto themselves? Sorta like maybe surface tension? Pulling everything to the center? Or how magnetic fields between .. Err... (forgive my lackadasical knowledge of basic physics.. Sheesh!) protons/neutrons.. Or planets...
If so, do identity facets have a natural tendency, or "desire", to collapse?
Relinquish the Ego on The Way...
I'm just wondering.. Is there any evidence of this concept in any existing human belief system? The Buddhist "letting go of self and other/multiplicity" for example?
Just thinking out loud... What do you all think?
No Comment
As part of my cable television package, I ordered . Nevermind that the news reported is from a european perspective (a welcome change from the CNN et al), but there are two other major characteristics of this All-News network I find fantastic:
First of all, there are no "anchor people". No spin doctors with gussied up hair and fake plastic airs giving you a rehashed, opinion-infused narrative. What you get are voiced-over introductions, as well as translations where necessary, of video reportage of events. Oh and no sensationalist crap - this is real news.
Then, they take it one step further.
A segment called "". And that is exactly what you get. Real, raw video footage, no reporter, no words, no stories, no crap. Just a look at what's going on. Bombings in Iraq, in Gaza... people running, screaming, pleading, dying.
No comment.
At one point, I tried a little mind trick on myself. I said to myself: "ok, you are not watching this on TV; you are watching this "on the web", a streaming video feed in someone's weblog."
The trick worked. I sat back, blown away, and overcome with . No, that word is not strong enough... grief and sadness.
They make these videos available .
Content & Relationship
During a "Content" conversation, I was brought to realize that things like "bar talk", "chewing the fat", "shootin' da shit", et al... are Relationship conversations. It was further pointed out that these are just as important as "real", or "Content", conversations, as they build bonds (albeit weak ones often, but nonetheless more or less important).
DUH! Of course! Why hadn't I made the conscious connection?! (Probably because I'm a loner by nature and that despite my quite good socializing skills, I DID spent the first 18 years of my life totally oblivious to the concept of "society" and "community"... )
This adds all the more weight to what ... ;)
(sans the Google screed)
Stick this in your Google and smoke it
In a comment on , :
I have no idea how to settle an argument about this, but I contend that, for the overwhelming majority of blog readers and writers, blogs have almost nothing to do with 'content', and everything to do with identity and relationships.
Yup. I have to agree entirely. To be precise, not all weblogs would be about content (few are) and not all weblogs would be "identity & relationship building". Many turn out to be a bit of both, in varying proportions (as well as being any number of other things, of course).
For example, predominantly "content-focused" weblogs would be maintained by their authors with the desire and belief that what they are publishing is worthwhile, relevant, interesting, etc... The validity of said belief is beyond the scope of my point, and the desire is at least notable. Among these we can count blogs by Journalists, blogs by pseudo-journailsts (no negative connotation implied!), academics, hobbyists blogging about their hobby, etc. Their goal, if I may say, IS to "publish and share hopefully, somehow, relevant content and perhaps elicit conversation/communication revolving around said content".
Examples of this would be
(tech journalism),
(academic/specialized interest), etc...
On the other end of the spectrum we would find the often maligned "what I had for lunch today" style weblog. Here, the idea is to share a bit of one's self and one's life, much as one does at the family dinner table or when "shootin' the shit" in light social settings and daily interactions. "Hey I saw such and such movie last night. I liked it." This essentially identity and relationship management. You get to know a heck of alot about somebody quick by reading their entries of this nature. You get to know them, as much or as little as they want you to, and they get to know you, as much or as little as you want them to.
Again, no absolutes: I am merely setting a possible scale.
So, why mention
in my title? Well folks, my little RowBoat here leans heavily to the "identity and relationship" side, and as such it seems rather pointless for it to be involved in the ongoing Google-washing that his happening. You wouldn't believe how many referers I get from search engines where people want
or to know
a . If I actually wrote about rowboats, it'd make sense, but as it is, it is merely a silly title I thought up when I was asking myself the perennial newbie blogger questions: "what is this weblog of mine? and what shall i call it?"
So, as of today, using the wonders of the "robots.txt" file, I will disallow search engine crawling of my archives. Also, more serious stuff (content I feel may be of some value/genuine interest) will be remanded to a separate weblog, which I will announce in due time,and which will not be closed to search engine crawlers (spiders, robots, what have you).
The effect of this, I expect, will be that I will be more inclined to fill up RowBoat with stuff about me and my life (fun eh!?)(as you opined, ), as well as actually post more of the smarty pants theories I come up with... and they will be much better written and researched of course (as you suggested ).
Lawnmower Man meets the Puppet Master
Part of an e-mail exchange with :
> I WANT what Kevin Warwick is working on! Hrm... Garr... :\
Ah come on, Boris. I know Kevin's all about thinking inside the body but try thinking outside the blog. You want to implant a chip with a copy of MT, the moz-gesture stuff and an 802.11b connection on it. Then you can stand around waving your arms like one of those airport dudes posting stuff to your weblog.
... you could surely get Canada Council money if you recast the idea as a modern dance project.
What happens when you start getting hammered by trackback pings and comment spam is a whole other story.
You *are* fuct in the head but who loves ya' anyway? ;-)
I almost fell off the sofa reading this. :D
One of the things
keeps trying to hammer into my head is location-based community communication tools... yeah something like that...
Or, something like this?
Electioneering, stats and the network effect.
What a seriously odd series of moments the last 72 hours have been.
Not five minutes ago I thought to myself "I'd like to see some visual representations of U.S. campaign stats. Like, where's the candidates money coming from, where are they spending it, where are they now, what are their itineraries, their timelines., etc...
Running though my RSS subscriptions, I came across , in which he links to . That takes care of request one.
Just before that, I checked my email for the first time today only to receive two separate emails, unrelated from each other (The emails that is - both senders I met in Boston and have shared meals and great conversations with and both of whom I now have very interesting friendships with), one inviting me to Burlington to hang out at
and the other inspiring me with the clout to do just that, though why exactly I would want to is still somewhat unclear to me.
Last night, I fought back tears watching
on The West Wing be given back his "wings" and admitted back into the "war room". Don't ask. The night before I watched, enthralled, a documentary about the Kennedy brothers and their politics. Go figure. Not to mention the
which blew me away and off to the bookstore to buy . For some weird reason I also grabbed "Political Philosophy - A Short Introduction". Can't hurt.
Back to stats, similar to the MoneyMaps above, yesterday I cam across a project by
, another fascinating person who was gracious enough to invite me along to a dinner he was having with
creator, Scott Johnson. Ethan's project (one of apparently many many,
being another) is "":
A Global Attention Profile looks at how a media outlet pays attention to 180 different nations. Instead of comparing how many stories Google has on the Green Bay Packers versus the Dallas Cowboys, we compare Google stories on Sudan versus Libya versus Lebanon. The resulting data gives us a picture of how an individual media source, at a given moment in time, pays attention to different nations.
Brilliant! Can we get one of these maps displaying Attention Profiles for the candidates?!
Why do I care. Dunno. I guess I think things are still pretty sour in the world and anything helps... ;)
BlogMemory, categories, redesigns
I created a new set of default MT templates which I will use whenever I set up new blogs for folks (which seems to be taking up much of my time these days...). Last night I decided to bite the bullet and eat my own dog food and applied them to mine. Some issues to be resolved: box model hack advanced quantum mechanics math (hello IE 6! .), font choices (meh), color choices (what's wrong with violet?!), etc...
Just now I was going through my categories, refactored some entries into more appropriate ones and deleted the never-or-too-rarely-used ones. While doing this, I of course "rediscovered" some old posts. Which got me... concerned... Hmmm...
This weblog is a mere one year old. It has about 500 entries. Not much by some standards, but it IS a heck of a lot of text I have written. Some of them are garbage, but some are, if I may say so, pretty good. I mean from my perspective anyways. I have some good ideas, no? ;)
So why concerned? Ok, concerned is the wrong word... It's just that, by the cheer action of "blogging it", I "forget it". Sort of. Not really but anyways. The good stuff isn't "earmarked" or "featured". It is lost in a mire of observations, link-dumping etc...
I wrote a few weeks back about splitting my blog into two, and
for it. There are many issues to doing this of course, but I really think it depends on what one is trying to achieve here... I'll make no bones about it: I want to 1- share bits of my life with anyone who so cares to follow along AND 2- share some of my deeper thoughts with some folks who don't necessarily want to wade though my daily flotsam. But I shelved the idea, temporarily, for deeper thought. I very much like categorisation (I am german afterall and as a child I had more fun putting away my Legos than actually building stuff with them...), but I also now have great misgivings about deep categorisation. (Insert huuuge discussion of search versus navigate.)
In any event, i will continue to ponder a "split" (the extreme implementation of which would mean an extraction of posts from here to the eventual "other" blog), and for now, the violet stays. :P
Collaborative classnote wiki
Newfound friend
has started up . (He already heads , a Montreal-based community Wi-Fi service, as well as running around tirelessly meeting with people to get all kinds of stuff going.)
Mike told me about his idea of a wiki where he could put his classnotes, and how he'd like to make it open to his fellow students to contribute to as well. We also talked about in-room IRC backchannels, etc. I told him he should go for it: "Build it and they will come." Apparently he's spoken to some of the school's bureaucracy and they brought up issues like the professor's Intellectual Property etc etc. I say to heck with 'em! Do it!
I'm watching ya Mike. ;)
Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools,moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
About the previous post
The importance of web architecture, permalinks, etc.
In the entry immediatly preceeding this one () I link to a very heavy and striking Flash based presentation of a "multimedia" piece by Ryuichi Sakamoto (and others). It is the sort of thing I would like a copy of, or at least a permanent URI for.
However because of the way it is published, I can have neither. At least not without a lot of work...
So, there are a number of problems here:
It is Flash. It is Flash called from within a Flash "launcher" meaning I cannot just suck down the actual Flash file. The URI for the page on which it appears is a very flakey "index2.html".
Discussing each "problem":
Grabbing a Flash file requires looking at the source, knowing what to look for, grabbing the URI, entering it an application that does HTTP GET and saving it locally. Becasue the actual content is loaded only after clicking onthe Flash "splash", the URI for it is hidden inside the Flash "splash". It is extractable, but the same as above applies, after which I must crack the thing open in Flash MX, find the reference and go get that. I am betting that that isn't even possible actually... Not sure. "index2.html" is bound to change the next time Sakamoto's webmaster puts up a new fature, at which point a) my link breaks and b) I never see the thing again.
Of course, the artist's intent counts here. Surely Sakamaoto-san does not want just anybody to come and grab this wonderful piece and weave it into their personal experience of life. Is the intent here to feature the bigger piece, "-LIFE-"? If so, great.. I'll buy it... let's see, where is there a link to buy the full piece? Hmmm not there... Oh hum... Not worth the hassle I guess...
So, in the end... I thank you Sakamoto-san for sharing this, temporarily, and I deplore you for not allowing me the chance to have a copy, by hook or by crook.
It's a shame really... I know for sure that sometime down the road, this piece will come up in my memory and I will want to share it with someone, show them... "look, listen, isn't this something?", but alas I will not be able to.
And your raison d'être? Is it not one of the artist's reasons for doing the work they (we?) do precisely to move and affect the society around us?
I would want the fruits of my labor to be spread far and wide. Either for free or for renumeration... In this case you do neither.
You need to blog.
And you need a Web Architect to work along side the renowned Web Artist who makes your website...
A news search engine which offers custom RSS feeds for topic searches (so you can track topics of interest to you).
Semi-conscious
In , he quips:I remember thinking in the dream, "oh, I should blog this... "
Judging from the comments, some folks find this strange and funny. I don't find it either. I think it's perfectly natural. Whenever you become fluent in any language/medium or exposed to them a lot, it is perfectly normal for the mind to start using the frameworks of said language/medium in its thought process, dreams included.
Cases in point: I find myself very often, many times a day in fact, composing blog entries in my head. Usually in a moment of recline, when relaxing or napping, drifting off into a semi-conscious state. I'll think about something and immediately switch into "blog voice". Sadly 99% of them never get written. (Hence once of the many reasons for my strong desire for a direct brain interface to my Mac, but I digress...)
A few years ago, after a particularly frenzied all day HTML &table&-layout coding session, I found myself having an extremely emotional dream.. all in HTML.
Have you never had characters and scenarios from a movie just watched that evening appear in your dreams that night?
This is somewhat off-point from what Joi said, but it is related. The fact that he can consciously in his dream *think* "I should blog this" is very telling as well. I've heard many times that keeping a journal of ones dreams is a great way to gain control of them, by extension control of one's mind and further of one's life.
Trick number one: in your next dream, make a conscious effort to look at your hands.
Me on BlogSpam
I wrote two things today about Blog Comment Spam.
One was sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list (which he published! Yay!):
Hello Mr. Farber,
/.../, the issue of Weblog Comment Spam is
one I have been following, and fighting, with aplomb lately.
First of all I'd like to recommend, as initial relief, for Movable Type
users, two excellent "MT-Plugins". Yes, they require installation, but for
folks who have actually installed MT themsleves, it is a snap and the
authors have outdone themselves in offering easy-to-use yet powerful
solutions.
The Plugins are:
Both authors have spoken about published and distributed
blacklists/whitelists, which with the very organic nature of the blog
ecosystem, could be quite powerful. Imagine TypePad, Userland and Blogger
all performing Bayesian filtering and sharing, in real-time, their lists...
Also, as noted in this thread, spam is a reality we encounter in many forms
in our environment: "snail mail" spam, e-mail spam... Personally I regard
most all forms of advertising as spam, but I digress.
Point being, I observe all this as I observe any living ecosystem, and, as
opined, the vibrant and rapid evolution and growth of the "blogosphere"
allows for a terribly accute perception of the development of this entity
(spam, that is).
Introduce a new organism into a stable ecosystem and watch what happens. The
inhabitants of the ecosystem are forced to adapt, take action, or be preyed
upon and die.
In the email ecosystem, the confines and limitations of the environment are
such that spam seems to be winning. The blog environment has much more
flexibility and tools at it's (easy) disposal.
Just some thoughts. Thank you.
The second was a comment on , where he introduced another take on the Turing test-style "read the characters in this randomly generated image and type them in to authenticate that you are a human being" spam-stemming techniques (a technique I myself had suggested here a few weeks back but which I now wholeheartedly reject.. thanks for setting me straight !):
Yeah, essentially these kind of "Turing test" type deals are not the best way to go, eventhough they may seem so. As we all know it essentially closes the door on some people. To put it in a "high-level" way: we place the burden of the fight on folks who have nothing to do with it. Legit vsitors/commenters (which are the 99% majority) are neither the propagators (the spammers) or the victims (the blog "owners", us).
Since we cannot go to the source and fight the spammers themselves, it falls on us to deal with it.
Therefore, so far, and by far, the best solution is James Seng's Bayesian comment/ping filter. If we build this out in a distributed fashion and get the blog-makers to integrate it, it will be massively powerful and effective. Jay's Blacklist system is also good (both did magnificent jobs on their respective MT plugins, BTW), but is much more labor intensive, especially in the long run.
My 2 cents. ;)
(see, now if I were blind or drunk.. or blind drunk, I could not have posted this comment... ;)
It's not me!
Yesterday afternoon I cought and deleted a strange piece of blogspam. It simply said "Boris rules" and linked to boris[dot]com. First thought was: yay, someone trying to be funny.
Ten minutes later, Joi asked me if I had posted "Boris rules" on his blog... "No of course not". "Hrmm" we both said, and deleted the entries.
"The trees are moving, Joi. The birds are agitated and flying high... something's up..."
I just saw on
that Mr. Boris must have been busy because
is, as of this moment, at #10, already declining.
So, for the record: It is NOT me.
"To hell with culture"
Sir Herbert Read ().Leading poet, publisher, educational theorist and social reformer, who was one of the most influential art critics of the twentieth century.
Having only read the introduction thus far, I wish to share with you some excerpts of it which I find highly relevant today, in the context of the cultural phenomena we are observing with the advent of weblogging et al, and the political ideas which have begun to float because them, "" chief among them. I also am personally fascinated by the roles of the artist, personal freedom and social expression.
"High profile"
I've been thinking a lot about a topic . One of the (many) issues/concerns facing "high-profile" people who should blog, is negative feedback. It is of course inevitable. Politicos will get flamed, intellectuals bashed, people in a position of influence, badgered.
On a purist level I am inclined to say: so what, deal with it... it is human expression and an important part of all of this. I can, however, fully understan from signal-to-noise ratios all the way to sheer emotional drain on the individual in question. Not to mention raw bandwidth costs.
gets more traffic than I can imagine... his blog would be on top of
within an hour and burst his host's already straining pipes and systems...
So what do we do for these folks? Well, first of all, obviously turn off comments. Hit one. T hit two. It's gonna be hard enough getting these folks into the
of "blogging" (read: share their minds) in the first place, that a trade off at this stage is definitely necessary. Compromise is the word.
Correction
Gees, sometimes I wonder about myself. In the above linked entry, I quote , then say "I think that's entirely the wrong route", and then proceed to discuss how I implemented something exactly as he suggested.
Duh. Somehow in my head what Gen said registered as "we need SPAM filters for blog comments". Which is not what he said. At all.
Sorry Gen. :\
I've set up a .
What is interesting about this development for me is how, almost immediatly, my attitude towards taking pictures has changed. It has changed in exactly the saem way my attitude towards writing changed when I started blogging.
"If I'm going to bother writing this down/taking this picture, then I bloody well should be able to share it in as easy a way as possible. Becasue I sure as hell ain't doing this just for myself. I want to share. If it were for myself, I wouldn't need all this stuff as my memory is quite good thank you very much."
For years I never took notes, never took pictures, because I knew it was all stored in my head (which it all still is). But I want to share. And it should be easy to do so...
Ahhh thank you CMSs! Now I can easily share! And more!
Please take note that the gallery has a Commenting feature. Please use as you see fit!
Hrm.. all this said... I think I may hack an MT set up and use it as my gallery....
Blogged bookmarks
asked me last night how I am managing bookmarks, and I told him I'm sort of floating around between my browsers and my RSS aggregator, basically forgetting sites I want to visit etc...
I mentioned however I was hacking an MT weblog to use as a bookmark manager, and, well, tonight I finished it.
(Not much in there yet... )
You'll notice the categories have RSS feeds so that I can subscribe to them in my RSS aggregator once and use it as my "bookmarks list".
I also use this to generate my "Blogroll" on this site.
Using MT templates I could easily generate XBEL archives as well, but this is useless since the only browser that uses XBEL is Mozilla (I think... not even sure of that) and it would use a local copy and not one it could fetch from the webserver (like RSS does...) and besides why would I? I can use my RSS aggregator as explained above.
How do I add Bookmarks? Easy: I use a Movable Type bookmarklet which allows me to make entries from the page I am on and wish to bookmark... It automatically, through the joys of JavaScript, pastes the URL and title of the page into the entry fields. I can also enter notes or excerpts or keywords into extra fields which then allow me to do a search of my bookmarks.
I've also left on Comments and TrackBacks on and leave the site open to whoever wants to see it. I figure I'm constantly sending emails and IMs to friends and we laugh or make comments.. this way it's all in one place and I'm not pestering anyone. ;)
Not too shabby eh? It IS a CMS afterall... ;)
Sleep time!
Joi interviewed by Lydon
Interesting. They covered alot of ground.
SP-LOG? BL-AM?
(Gen: sorry for the dual Trackback!) blogged about "ZipCode", the blog comments spammer, whom I have been affected by as well.
Gen says: We may need to implement some kind of anti-spam comment posting mechanism in the not-too-distant future.
I think that's entirely the wrong route. Witness how well it is working for email... NOT. ;)
We need to put locks on our doors. Many ways to do this. Authentication, identification, etc...
Or how about one of those little sliding slits where you speak the secret and you are shown in?
I have used a little PHP and some GIFs to demonstrates how this may work. Go post a comment on this entry... You will notice a field titled "Secret" with a 5 character, randomly generated image based "secret" you must retype exactly in order for the comment to get posted. Well... not really... I don't have the wizardry to actually make this work.. it is just for show... (oh wait.. i can make it more convincing using JavaScript.. I will do this later tonight!)
Lemme know what your thoughts are on this.
Please weblog
I want everyone to blog. More importantly I want people who could be
as "" to blog.
I have found myself recently trying to explain what blogging is and have come to realise it is a hopelessly silly task. "Online journal" makes most people scrunch up their nose, while "connected intelligence" makes them scratch their heads. Besides, the Content Management Systems which make blogging possible are versatile enough already that a weblog is whatever you want it to be. Or rather, whatever you want to put in it.
So yeah, I want some folks with really important things to say to blog as well. I am not say there aren't any, nor am I saying the "A-list" bloggers and current super stars of blogging aren't saying anything interesting (to the contrary). I am saying we need more. Much more.
Ok we now have two U.S. presidential candidates sort of blogging. Big deal. While a good thing in itself, I can't help but smell hidden agendas and "riding the trend" mind-sets.
No, I want the real deal.
I want , for example, Michael Moore to blog. I want Noam Chomsky to blog. David Suzuki should blog. I want every truly outspoken, vocal and already known "crazy person" to blog.
Why you may ask? These people already publish, appear on TV, make movies, etc. Why blog?
Turn your tongue one hundred times before speaking.
Folks are going ape about cellphones with call-recording features. Privacy this and privacy that.
On the above linked entry I commented:
Very simple: never say anything that you will regret. What's the big deal? The issue here is not privacy, it is discretion. The person recording your conversation is the person you are having the conversation with in the first place. When I have conversation with you via email, we both have records of it. Same for IM, or weblog commenting/trackbacks.I wish I had recordings, and transcripts, of every phone call I ever was involved in. Not for legal issues, or blackmail, but for a record of memories and ideas and people.
and then further added:if you cannot say things you won't regret, don't regret the things you say.
Fuzzy navels
David Weinberger says:I think it'd be more accurate to say that blogs are conversational.
For a little while I agreed, and for a little while it was true. It still is a little true, but only for a little longer.
As the numbers increase, I think we may find ourselves again alone in a crowd. Sometimes having conversations, sometimes making chitchat, often speaking to ourselves.
Blogging is as much a conversation as masturbation is making love. Sleeping around, dating, abstaining and finding our one true swinger group can all be groanfully real analogies we could entertain.
(I am not saying masturbation isn't making love, I'm saying the many nuances of who/what/when/where and quality are all implicated.)
Belonging and esteem
Joi posted
today. (The juicy part is after the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" quote.)
The point I sense he's trying to make has to do with how social software (to be specific, web- and cellphone-based expression, communication and social networking tools), which essentially allows for very easy community building by anyone, has at least one very positive side-effect: self empowerment (for lack of a better term coming to mind just now).
Depending on individual personalities of course, weblogging alone makes it really quite easy to start being involved in a community. That starts connections in the real world via such things as, for example, monthly weblogger meetups. Online, one starts posting to weblogs of peopel with similar interests, etc, and bonds are very easily created. In professional circles, one may be incited to attend a conference or presentation one would otherwise not heard of or felt qualified/"worthy" to attend. (In my case,
and the .)
Being a regular on Joi's IRC channel, #joiito, has had similar effect for me. A chance to discuss with peers, as equals, on far ranging topics, has not only elevated my feeling of worth, but has also helped my people skills tremendously. That's not to say I was "bad" with such things before, but i have definitely grown as a person, partly because of it (and partly because of "real world" experienc some occurring because of weblogging/chatting and some not).
Previous to all this, my only online social interaction was with a small group of friends via IM and email. Though I solidified some great friendships (and very sadly totally failed one) via IM and email, it was totally contained, non-expansive, limited in some ways. This of course is part and parcel with the nature of the technology, and does not fall into the aforementioned category of "social software".
Joi continues with:"I know that we've had tools for awhile now and online communities are not a new thing, but I think the barrier to entry continues to decline and the tools keep getting better". Absolutely, and I agree with 's
on the subject, sort of. I take issue with part of his statement: "create end-user experiences that so rock the house, that business models are the last thing we think about"Marc, while yes user-experience is pa-ra-mount, a thoroughly thought out and well designed business model will see the thing survive and thrive. If not business model than at least some form of well planned (designed?) short-term goals. Don't get me wrong, I much prefer thinking of user-experience, but we have to keep all elements of a thing in mind.
The entry finishes with: "I'm also quite interested in how this relates to mobile phones. hmm... " Hmm indeed. Mobile phone address books/buddy lists, ubiquitous, though unintrusive, availability and connectivity (remember we are talking text-messaging and not voice calls) (and
wrote a ), and of course moblogs: the gateway to all the goodies of web-based social activities and endeavors.
This is everything I want to, and will be, totally into. Thank you, weblogging, for allowing me to allow myself to.
T'o'rip Space
Wonderful presentation of this GPS enabled, 3D interfaced, essentially moblog sphere service/application...
IRC to weblog
Over on 's , I expressed the desire to have an ongoing log of the goings-on. It caused some heated debate and Joi decided we should discuss it and come to a decision via his .
So here I will explain my idea a bit more fully and why I think it would be at least a neat thing to try out, in the spirit of Joi's .
First of all, the reasons I'd like a log of the channel are several fold:
1- catch up on anything interesting I may miss while I am asleep or commuting to work or otherwise logged off from the channel. 2- I feel much of what goes on there would be interesting to a bunch of other people who otherwise may not want to participate in an IRC "life". Also a log would remove the time requirement of participating etc...
Secondly, a simple "log" is not what I had in mind. I'd like the "log" to be dumped, in XHTML, into a weblog CMS system (I believe
to be the tool of choice here), enabling it with Comments and Trackbacks and making it available to Google and Technorati. This would extend the conversation while stripping the time element.
I propose a proof of concept. A separate IRC channel complete with a logging bot which would dump everything into xhtml textfiles, ordered by day and perhaps at one hour increments, into a directory on a webserver which would have Bloxsom running over them. We could dev this out there, show it off.. and perhaps do a trial run for a day or two on #joiito...
So, I need an IRC channel, a python bot script and an installation of
on a server... i can take care of the last one, who will do the first two? :)
I've been online since only 1996 or so, but I have never gotten into IRC (Internet Relay Chat)... until this past week. It is total virtual world immersion/time limbo induction. The week gone by seems like a speck of dust floating in a smokey room.
And I have never made so many new friends in so short a time. The experience, however, also extends into the "real world" (a term I dislike more and more as all is "real" to me now: online, offline, dream and awake... ) where in this past week I have also done more, moved more air, met more people and proactively participated more in my own life than I have in months.
Discussing identity and space in a virtual environment, preparing for a tattoo which will serve as a reminder of my physical form, planning a trip to a place I hope will push the last puzzle piece into place in my understanding of... well... I'll let you know when (if) it does. ;)
As long as you all, both online and off, in my space and in my dreams, are around, I'll know I am not insane, for reality is a discussion & consensus of perceptions, nothing more.
No really, I am fine. ;)
Email: natural interface for weblogging?
Thinking about setting up my moblog for my trip to Japan, I immediately thought that I'd have to troubleshoot the setup. Seeing as I don't have a cellphone with e-mailing capabilities, let alone built-in camera, i wondered if 's moblog python script can handle email sent from a regular MUA (mail user agent). Theoretically, yes of course.
Then I smacked my head. "Of course, this must be one of the reasons !" I remember a few months back listening to Karl talk about the difficulties of maintaining a blog via email. Myself I am not worried about edits and such (maintenance) but merely posting.
So, to do: set up a test blog and start using Entourage to post blog entries.
This is kinda interesting to me because I'm feeling limited as it is with the current blog posting/editing interfaces I am using... MT's admin site is great except I have to click around alot to get stuff done, and copy and paste URLs and hand code links etc. Kung-Log is nice but it's been acting very bad lately - it for some reason converts the opening brackets in any HTML I insert into ascii.. which I then have to go clean up, by hand, via MT. So basically, it's become useless. Also, Safari doesn't like MT's Bookmarklets so quick blogging of links is out of the question. Sparkign anothe rbrowser and then copy and pasting the URL an dthen hittign the bookmarlet sorta defeats the purpose... Ah well...
So yeah, on with it eh...
Precisely my cunundrum
Your mind becomes a part of the space as well. Your own personal site becomes an extension of your memory, as in Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex, but your memories also become part of the Web's collective intelligence.
I am finding it harder and harder to differentiate my brain from the extended one (the web). So much of my memory now is linked to (or points to) "places" on the web, that when I am not "online" I feel diminished in many ways.
I don't know where in "the real world" that restaurant you told me about is... but I sure know where I can find it online in under 15 seconds...
"Oh I have an interesting tidbit of information pertaining to what you just said... oh wait... what was it again... I found it through that site the other day.. the URL is http://... damn... "
Augmented memory. Cyborg. Hello.
For years I've been playing with the idea that man created the computer in his own image. Memory, I/O, software, hardware, etc. Most of my friends have heard about the "scripts" I've "written" and "run as background processes" in my mind to, for example, make sure I never lose my keys or leave the house without my wallet. We all program our brains, and sometimes have them programmed for us. I could go on, but tonight I'm interested in exploring the subconscious, and to do that I'll look at the CLI, or Shell, or Terminal, or whatever your operating system calls it. For the purposes of this article I'll call it the terminal, because I'm a Mac OS X kind of guy.
Think of the Terminal as the window into the subconscious of your computer. Now, let's turn that around and see if we have a T a window into our own subconscious. Keep in mind that the Terminal not only allows us to peer in, but also to effectuate commands... and run scripts...
Teenaged cyborgs, moblogging and Emergence.
Link found on , and quotes below lifted from the
it linked to.
''[Cellphones] extend the spatial and temporal boundaries of a physical encounter,'' she said, explaining that cellphones are providing a way for young people to stay in touch when they are apart.
It is far more than a mere "way to stay in touch when they are apart". That what we've been using telephones for since the start. The interesting part is how cellphones, with integrated, easy instant messaging "extend the spacial and temporal boundaries". Extend? It erases them, and not merely for "physical encounter": for direct communication. Take this:
Linked by cellphones and possessing the ability to exchange silent messages anytime, anywhere, these young people respond to each other quickly, creating the feeling of always being connected.
"Always being connected" + "always being able to communicate" = social network, and more. Read on.
While we're on the topic... (RSS)
. He bought and read 's new O'Reilly book
"", Of course this means I have to run out and get it too (shame on me for not having it already!).
As , Ito-san nails the issue right on the head: It's flexibility vs. simplicity. RSS 2.0 is cool because it extends the simplicity of the original 0.9x RSS with modules. RSS 1.0 is cool because there are so many things you can do with RDF. The problem with RDF is that it is so ugly to read. Honestly, this morning I wouldn't understand what I have just written. The geek inside me is now awake and I want to learn everything there is to know about RDF, bu it took a bunch of people pummeling me to get me to care, whereas plain old RSS 0.91 got me excited just looking at the code. So, I guess I'm on Dave's side in terms of keep it simple and help get it widely accepted. On the other hand, the RDF stuff really does allow a lot of the semantic web attributes that we are talking about in the emergent democracy debate and the RDF framework, once it really starts to get picked up inside of applications could be really powerful.
Myself, I've been cheering for RDF. Not out of any profound understanding of it, mind you. Just out of a very high-level overview conception I have formed over the course of some reading and conversations about it. It does seem to me to be hugely powerful, but I must say that I too tend to have my eyes gloss over whenever I actually look at the code itself. Then again, the same happens, to a lesser degree when I look at any mark up (except HTML/XHTML... after tens years of the stuff I have found myself dreaming in tables some nights!).
Anyways, yes RDF "allows" incredible flexibility, and yes it is a, forgive my french, a "bitch". The true tragedy here is that it has not been adequately picked up by tool developers, which would allow it to reap the benefits of a moderate critical mass.
Let's look at it a tad deeper though, and compare it to other "standards" out there.
And by all means, if I am way off or outright wrong in what I say, feel free to correct me!!! ? ? ? ? Anyone! :)
Emergence: post-anarchy?
Reading the initial chapters of "" by Steven Johnson, wherein, amongst many other things, he speaks of a young Engels' sojourn in Manchester, England, I am struck by a correlation of political and sociological ideas.
Johnson quotes Engels' apparent half-realisation and mild appallement in seeing what appears to have been an auto-development of social segregation in the urban "un-planning" which occurred in Manchester with the arrival and explosion of the industrial revolution. (Working class and middle class sectors of the city being almost perfectly segregated is not something a budding socialist-cum-marxist finds particularly "well and good", I suppose. However, the fact that it just sort of "happened" without any planning is not lost on the young Engels - he just doesn't see the natural ramifications: emergence in other words. He's just dismayed by it and moves along.)
Ourselves moving along, in the context of the recent thoughts of "" by
and 's "" (though I'd call it "Emergent Superpower" since "second" denotes class/rank, and "emergent" brings with it all the force of it's associated notions), as well as Ito-san's apparent strong desire for Japanese
(interesting how
in the ...) I can't help but to think of that other, much maligned political system, communism, and it's role as the usher for Emergent Democracy.
Some points he's missing
writer Andrew Orlowski misses a few points, and makes some fair ones, in his article .
To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.
He's referring to the term "Second Superpower", as used by
in his recent article "".
Language and ideas naturally "erode" and or "morph" over time and use. Some examples: historical accounts, religious beliefs, urban myths, pop lyrics. In the arena of instantaneous multi-party communication, which is one of the qualities of weblogging (online conversations, who's only connection to time, ironically, is timestamps), this natural process is accelerated - McLuhan would say - at the speed of light.
Mr. Olowski's contention that the meaning has been "erased" and "obliterated" is his opinion, which is debatable. An inevitable result of hyper-acceleration of communication coupled with sound-byte culture is, afterall, the cliché: a phrase who's original notion and context has been lost. However, with Weblogging, it is not really lost: it is all still there, recorded. It's just a question of taking off the "Google-goggles", or any other blinders, be they technological or social. (Trackbacks, by the way, are a great way of doing this: maintaining the links in the chain.)
As with Moore, academic and historical research in this field is vapored away, as if by magic.
I agree and disagree here. While I do not know Moore's or Ito's academic, historical or scientific "worth", I too can recognize the fact that, naturally, they are not all knowing and that what they write is limited by their own experience. However, they are CONTRIBUTING to the CONVERSATION, and in many cases, starting it. This is INVALUABLE. The fact that they achieve high "PageRanks" serves all the better to get more people with other experiences to join in. Keep in mind, weblogging with this kind of intent is very young and the tools still rudimentary. We are all still in awe of how effective and fast this is now. Imagine 6 months, a year, 10 years from now - 42 days will seem like an eternity. Heck it already does!
Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs." They peg it at about four per cent. But we're looking at a small sub-genre of blogdom, the tech blogs, and specifically, we're looking at an 'A list' of that sub- sub-genre.
What did I just say? It has only just begun! And allow me to correct: it is not "tech-blogs". We are seeing , , , marketers, , artists,
etc etc, slowly but surely joining the fray. Granted, they mostly come from tech-related milieus, but this is to be expected. The term "early-adopters" applies still. Imagine if
offered free and easy Weblogs for all it's subscribers... Oh look!
is now at Harvard! What's that? He's pushing the use of Weblogs there? FANTASTIC!
Criticism is welcome, preferably constructive criticism. Especially when it comes from someone who is part of the conversation. So let's have it . When can we expect your voice, and sharp mind, to truly
Learn to love Trackbacks
Trackbacks are, IMHO, vital to future wikkidness of weblogging. If you use Movable Type (or any of the supporting systems), turn on TrackBacks NOW. And use them. Often.
&&What are your thoughts on Lily Chou-Chou?&&
&& [[ some thoughts about the movie
&&Erm... Not sure... I found it very difficult to follow (who is who, who does what, what are the relationships between the characters... When is what happening...), which is disconcerting in itself since my own life is really quite limbo-esque, meandering between "reality" and the inside of my head. I also found it extremely maddening.. The things these kids do to each other without anybody ever doing anything about it. Made me want to get up and scream a few times.&&
&&What I liked the most was some of the most awesome cinematographic "shots" I've seen in a looong time, and, though it was motion sickness inducing at times, I appreciated the use of the homevideocam for parts of the film. All in all, it's very modern and cool and all. I did enjoy it, but it left me in a quite emotionally perturbed state... &&
&&From: Bopuc&&
Finally the "R" word...
In his case he speaks of Japan and it's political/economic systems, but I've been itching to hear it lobbed about here in North America, and more specifically, in the U.S. Helloooo wildly corrupted borderline fascist state!!!
But this is not why I am writing this tonight.
Digital Identity
This is a hot topic with many implications and applications. Most of the time when DigiID is mentioned, it is in context of government programs to give everyone universal identification. The fear there is of course centralized governmental control of your identity. While there certainly may be benefits in this, it nonetheless opens frightening possibilities.
But this is not what I wish to address here.
I'm thinking again about "your URI is your identity". Self-managed and SECURE Digital Identification.
Le Web c'est des humains
Indeed, when one considers the Web as a force for expression and communication, especially in the context of Weblogging, we can begin to not only see the truly biological characteristics of the Web, but also gain insight into the human mind.
I feel fairly confident to say that, in some cases & not all & weblogs are a sort of extension of one's mind: a memory offload, a place to store thoughts and experiences and share them with the community at large. The ability to comment and "trackback" (off-site commenting essentially) creates a conversation: 2-way communication.
A conversation between weblogs? No. A conversation between people: humans, human minds.
FOAF & trust/authority
Good. This came up during their panel "The Future of Weblogging". Let's see what we can do with this.
Of connexe interest,
format using the "bio" namespace he is pushing. I spoke to David at the EFF party on, erm, Monday night and we spoke about how this could be used for various self-managed digital identity systems. VERY cool.
Necessary evil.
Name dropping is a necessary evil when attending a schmooze-fest such as SxSW. In fact I've always felt it to play a rather significant role in initial contact with a new person. It allows the other to quickly get a gage of the people you've linked with and who may have linked to you. Real-space blogrolling, in other words. It is one more device in the trust/authority toolbox available to us in our social engineering.
Of course, as with all things, moderation is the key.
The village elders
Or "(wisdom + character) * concensus = authority"
Or "Weblog Trust Indexing"
Traditionally, small communities have always had "the village elder(s)": a person or persons who, through experience and intelligence aquired wisdom, who's character brought them into the forefront of their community's consciousness and through the building of trust in him (them) by the community achieved a level of authority.
Keep in mind, I am NOT talking about the "might is right" crowd here.
Weblogging, when used to share one's knowledge and experience, allows for such a dynamic to develop as well.
What's all this now?
I've built a proof-of-concept WebBlog rating system for my RowBoat. Visitors (you all!) can rate entries on my weblog by clicking the [+], [=] or [&] symbols below.
- Visitors can rate individual weblog entries.
- ratings are "positive" [+], "neutral" [=] or negative [&].
- [+](positive) can symbolise agreement, good feeling, coolness etc
- [&] (negative) .. the opposite.
(Here's the important part:)
- all ratings are compiled into an "OverAll Rating" (at the top right-hand side of the screen). This rating gives an immediate visual indicator of the Weblog' i.e. how the readers of this Weblog regard it.
Knowledge, language and cultural erosion
forwarded me
mailing list.
It raises concerns regarding the degradation of global culture due to the alarming rate of extinction of many of the world's languages...
They're picking up on it... slowly...
What's happening now is that Google has realised that the conversations being conducted by members of the weblogging community has become an important body of content. Acquiring Blogger moves the search engine into pole position for organising and exploiting this amazing resource. It's so simple that only geniuses could think of it. But that's Google for you.
Collective writing
Are we all not just writing in the same big book?
Are we all not just contributing to one large account of our lives, our thoughts, ideas and dreams?
Are we not writing our own history?
Who really are the history writers of today? Will someone take on the herculean task of revising the inumerable stories of our times in order to formulate "a historical narrative"? If someone does, they will most likely refer to journalistic sources mostly, which arguably cannot be considered truthful or authorative or complete.
on Joi Ito's weblog:
Can it be that the 'Net, through weblogging and collaborative writing, is the Master Narrative to end all master narratives? A massive chronicling (and shaping) of history and experience as we live it?
And, to whit:
"It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors."-
I highly recommend (again!)
"" by Robert Fulford.
More BlogMind tools!
This is getting more and more interesting. PopDex is like
and , but they will "weigh" the links, like 's "" algos.
Essentially, the more a particular blog or blog entry is linked to, the more authoritive it is considered.
mentioned that there is one caveat here: a link is not qualified. In other words, I may link to something (and a system like PopDex would take that as a "vote for") when in reality I may say something like "what this guy says here is bull!" (i.e. a negative vote).
( would then say "Ha! Silly hypertext web people! Had you used my
architectures instead of the web, you could make such things explicit!" Sillyness. The precise reason for the successful existence, growth and evolution of the web is precisely this lack of "control-points", as
calls them. It's totally organic. There is no god, no MCP, no laws or guidelines. If there is anything, it is an embrace of chaos and it's patterns. is that not what Zen fundamentally wants us to embrace?)
To get back to Karl, I say this is not necessarily true. Consider the whole thing like any other human or natural environment. Just becasue I speak of something doesn't mean I speak ill OR well of it. The fact of linking does NOT automatically mean I support it. Also, it allows for auto-policing, to a certain extent.
Consider this: Pundit Joe posts something at 9am. By 10am, 20 people have read it. 10 of them have linked to it from their blogs and comment on it. It appears in blogdex as a hottopic. Does this mean it is right? Not at all! It means it's hot. 8 of the 10 people who linked it and are commenting on it are denouncing it as false. Some may say "yes but that original post is still there and someone who never sees the denouncements will be mislead. So what? This happens all the time in daily "real world" interactions as well. It is up to the individual to 1- weigh the information he/she encounters and 2- to further research the issue.
(I am reminded of two things here: Tao: "he who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know"... "he who knows a site is full of bull does not link to it, he who does is full of bull himself..." or something like that... and Hamlet "Nothing is so bad but thinking makes it so".)
So Doc, calling it "[] []" links us to a fun piece
blogged up, where he goes on about Zen Buddhism and pop song lyrics. (Didn't Bono also sing "Every artist is a cannibal, a thief"?)
How to explain the pattern I discern?
(Let me be clear that I am not refuting or slagging rageboy's post, just adding it to my pattern)
Literary theory, semiotics: intertextuality, recognition, interpretation. While wonderful tools they are, applying such notions can be... decieving. (Did the .) Umberto Eco's
explores this concept rather thoroughly.
On a side note: one Fabio Rambelli seems to be spending his time . To what end? To achieve a deeper understanding of Zen, presumably. That, to me is akin to studying my shoes to gain a deeper understanding of how blood flows to my toes. Or how I walk... hellooo !
Hmmm, I seem to be irrevocably off course now. Allow me to finsih with some
quotes, just so's I look smart. ;)
From "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal":
"It may be that universal history is th ehistory of a handful of metaphors."
From "The Library of Babel":
"The universe (which others call the Library) [...]
Hmmm.. apply Borges'
writings against the Internet. Speak to me of order in chaos. Speak to me of patterns. Comfort me with apples.
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