More news on the Identity Metasystem front, and a rose by another name, Identity 2.0. Wired News reports a new Tony Perkins/Marc Canter project, GoingOn, to be launched in the fall. Marc Canter is referring to it as "the world's first true DLA," or Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. They have venture backing for the project, which will presumably have some relation to the identity metasystem concept.

If you've noticed more and more malicious garbage hitting your inbox, it may be because professional criminals are moving to cyberspace, according to a CNet article.

The IT security landscape has changed over recent months, with credit card fraud gangs, virus writing gangs, spammers and malicious hackers becoming more closely entwined, Cluley said. He cited three gangs who he said epitomized the threat: Superzonda, HangUp and ShadowCrew.

Maida Barbour sent a link to the Wooster Collective, "A Celebration of Street Art," the most fascinating art blog I've seen...wow. [Link]

Ragstaffers from Austin's late, great first "underground" or alternative newspaper, The Rag, will have a reunion September 3-4, including an art show and a "Rag Mama Rag" concert. (Rag Mama Rag , a song from The Band's second album, was adopted by Rag vendors on the drag, who would probably be controversial if not imprisonedif they reappeared today – quoting without a license.) I wrote a few record reviews for the Rag and went to the meetings, which I recall were in the basement of the University YMCA, which was where the Scientology building now sents, if I remember correctly (this was the hazy past). Everybody who showed up voted on each piece submitted for the week's issue. At the time I t hought I was destined to be a rock critic, so I wrote record reviews, but when my review of the Dylan bootleg known as the Great White Wonder was voted down for length, I lost interest (and later changed majors from Journalism to English after a particularly intense short story course... though I still assumed I would write about media someday...actually a longer story connected to my high school and college newspaper columns under the header "Media Man,") Heh... I'm lapsing into reverie here... but I plan to attend the Rag Reunion, and if you want a taste of the rag, several issues are posted online, along with some photos. There's also a piece about the reunion in the Austin Chronicle.

My business partner Jeff Kramer created Common Content, a site where anyone can add their Creative Commons-licensed content to an index and specify the kind of content, e.g. audio, movie, web page. He created the site after hearing Lessig at SXSW Interactive a couple of years ago, and the site was effective until the link spammers found it. Jeff implemented moderation to control the spam, but keeping moderation current was a bear for one guy, so I've been helping out. I don't know what's more amazing, the amount of good stuff licencsed via CC, or the amount of spam posted at the site. Maybe they misunderstood what the site was for? On some sites it's hard to tell whether it's licensed with CC or not, so I made a new rule: if I can't find the CC reference, I don't approve the item. What throws me, though, is the number of sites submitted that have no CC license, and a line that says "copyright...all rights reserved."

eweek has a good piece by Chris Nolan about the various legislative battles over municipal wireless, including the one that's shaping up at the federal level, where U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions from Texas,a former SBC employee, has proposed legislation to ban muni wireless projects nationwide. Sessions bill is the opposite fo the McCain-Lautenberg Community Broadband Act of 2005, which would allow muni networks.

Unfortunately Nolan gets it wrong about the recent battle within the Texas legislature against a municipal broadband prohibition in a telecom bill sponsored by Representative Phil King. She suggests that the broadband prohibition defeated by Austin Wireless City, a nonprofit that uses volunteers to set up wifi in various venues around Austin. Austin Wireless City is part of Austin Wireless, an organization that also include the Austin Wireless Group (this gets complicated, especially considering that there's also an Austin Wireless Alliance... but I digress). Austin Wireless had a minor role in the effort, but the real work of challenging the legislation was orchestrated through the Save Muni Wireless coalition, with a few players doing much of the work, including Adina Levin, Tim Morstad, Chip Rosenthal, Wayne Caswell, Gene Crick, and others, including folks who are already planning or working on various muni broadband projects around the state.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, Joi says that Japanese of his generation don't really think much about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when they do, it's more of a remix.

To be sure, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still plays a part in the imagery of popular culture. But more meaningful references to Japan's nuclear past, like those in the story of Godzilla (awakened from his slumber by American atomic tests) or the cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa's best-selling series about a Hiroshima survivor, have morphed into the cultural equivalent of elevator music.

Indeed, Japanese culture is unusual (although by no means unique) in its ability to take shocks or disturbances and gradually transform and neuter them. In that respect, today's atomic imagery in pop culture is not so different from the mohawked punks who apologize profusely if they bump into you in downtown Tokyo: the T-shirts they wear with violent, antisocial slogans (in English) are an aesthetic statement, not a moral one.

Not long ago, CNN's Miles O'Brien tossed off a comment implying that where Al Qaeda is concerned, the Internet may be the problem. Today the Washington post is running a longer piece (requires free registration) that says

al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

We should be attentive to the story between the lines here: if people use the Internet to do terrible things, what should we do? That question's come up more than once since access to the Internet started spreading in the early '90s, often from people and organizations who, on the scale balancing openness and freedom with social control, put their thumb heavily on the social control side, The world would be so much simpler and safer if we had more restrictions, they think, though there's never been much evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Consider a substitution: if people use free speech to do terrible things, what should we do? This suggests the slippery slope we're on when we talk about restricting the Internet. As Mike Godwin used to say, often, in the freedom/control discussions... the best response to "bad" speech is more speech. If we're concerned that young Muslims will join the jihad because of something they read online, perhaps we should support wiser, nonviolent Muslims in their attempts to dialog with potential terrorists in their midst.

Whatever the case, we should get ready for the next attempt to regulate speech on the Internet, an inevitable response to this idea of web-based jihad.

New FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has a perspective that's disturbingly different from his predecessor's. (Thanks to Michael Maranda for the pointer.) [Link]

Charlie won the prestigious science fiction award for The Concrete Jungle... which is posted online with a Creative Commons license. Via Cory on boingboing.

You know you're a real geek when you dream about Search Engine Optimization. I dreamed last night that somebody wanted to bring me in to consult on SEO, and I told 'em "You only need to know one thing: don't bury the lede!" This is journalist jargon, explained here under "structure." On the web it's not so much a question of getting the right lede as getting the right information on the page so that it'll turn up in relevant searches. Search engines don't focus so much on the keyword metatag, which ain't that important anymore (probably because so many people tried to work screwy metatag voodoo (reflected in this list of keyword myths compiled by Jono Craig).

Actually, I could never see myself consulting on SEO best practices since all you really need to know, you can find in online references like the WikiPedia page on subject. However I could imagine consulting on content development for SEO, or strategies to improve page ranking (by getting linked by other sites that already have a good page rank). But there's no SEO voodoo - you "optimize" by being very good at what you do.

I've been complaining about the lack of good stats on blog readership. Looks like we have better data; just received this press release:

50 Million Americans Visited Blogs During the First Quarter 2005, According to New comScore Study
First Comprehensive Study of the Actual Online Behavior of Blog Visitors Now Available

RESTON, Va., Aug. 8, 2005 - comScore Networks today released a report detailing the scale, composition and activities of audiences of Weblogs, commonly known as "blogs." The report, which was sponsored in part by Six Apart and Gawker Media, found that nearly 50 million Americans, or about 30 percent of the total U.S. Internet population, visited blogs in Q1 2005. This represents an increase of 45 percent compared to Q1 2004.

Other key findings of the Behaviors of the Blogosphere report include:

• Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in Q1 2005, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
• Of 400 of the largest blogs observed, segmented by eight (non-exclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
• Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

To view the full Behaviors of the Blogosphere analysis, please visit Just rec'd the press release: To view the full Behaviors of the Blogosphere analysis, please visit http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf

The threat of terrorists spreading information online may be overstated by those who assume that the information is accurate and useable, when that might not be the case. Kyle Johnson sent me a short bit from Secrecy News in response to Terrorists and the Internet:

"Among other things, al Qaeda and its offshoots are building a massive and dynamic online library of training materials," the Post reported, and offered sample documents from this library on its own web site.

But contrary to the Post story line, the cited library materials suggest a startling lack of technical competence. Unfortunately, the Post did not critically examine the materials that it presented.

Earlier I mentioned how there's finally a study of blog readers . Now, thanks to Mary Hodder et al., there's a richer sense of the measure of blog value than we get from links alone, which can be very misleading.

So a couple of months ago, at a dinner at Les Blogs, a group of us (including Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls and Halley Suitt among others) talked about what it would mean to make an index that could give a clearer sense of a blogger's reach and influence, that might upend the inbound link counts to give some clarity to what is now opaque and hard for us to see blogs we are unfamiliar with but want to find context. Actually, the service was taking a while, and with 30 or so bloggers in the room, eventually things turn to blogging. We started talking about the issue of inbound links and how, counted up and reported as a kind of "attention index," as a show of interest or attention or conversation, they weren't very interesting or telling on their own, partly because they lump together all types of links, no matter when the links were made or where they are from (blogrolls or posts).


Part of what we want is a rich user generated ontology resulting in topic groups that is constantly adjusting to find what's delightful, useful, interesting across blogs. And a more complex metric for understanding those topic groups and individual users as they blog memes and interact with each other, with some context around those bloggers, would help quite a bit.

This is a press release/open letter re. the evident intention of the Texas Legislature to consider telecom legislation sometime today, as part of the special session. I would have said "Texas citizens" rather than "consumers," but it appears that our role as consumer is more important to the lege these days... //Jon L.

To: Governor Perry, Lt. Governor Dewhurst, Speaker Craddick, Members of the Texas Senate and Texas House

Today we are calling on you, our state's leaders, to stand up for Texas consumers. We are asking that you resist the pressure by telephone company lobbyists to pass hasty telecommunications laws in the last days of this second special session.

We know that phone companies like SBC and Verizon have continued to push, almost daily, for the leadership of the House and Senate to pass HB 13 (Rep. King) and SB 5 (Sen. Fraser). We know you're outnumbered; there are more registered telephone industry lobbyists than members of the House of Representatives. But this session was called to reform school finance and lower property taxes, not to appease lobbyists demanding special interest legislation simply to increase their profits.

We know the availability of advanced communications networks and services is vital for the people and communities of Texas. That's why consumers of these services deserve well-considered legislation, not 'one-day' lobby bills passed by tired, divided legislators. We ask you to take the time needed to do this important job well. We ask that you consider the fact that no interest group or constituencies, other than big phone companies who stand to benefit, support the current versions of telecom legislation you are being asked to enact.

We are here today to tell you again the reasons we oppose these bills – to tell you why these bills will increase prices for consumers, how they will divide Texas communities, and how fair competition and consumer choice will be undermined by HB 13 and SB 5.

Please listen to our concerns. Texas needs your best efforts to consider and enact telecom laws that serve the interests of consumers rather than corporations.

While the groups standing together in opposition to these bills may see different reasons for opposing SB 5/HB 13 – including increased rates, economic redlining, loss of community control, harm to competition and local businesses, plus pressures for hurried, secret passage – we all agree on one thing, that these bills are bad for Texas consumers.

Who, besides SBC and Verizon, wants these laws? Consumer groups, city leaders, competitive business have consistently opposed the ever-changing versions. Our Legislature would not pass these during previous sessions. So why let a lobby steamroll them through now? Telecom is vital for our state's economy and the daily lives of our families. Please get all the facts and hear all the viewpoints as you consider and decide the future of telecommunications in Texas.

We hope our leaders stay true to your commitment that no other issues are going to be taken up until our school finance system and property tax system are reformed.

When he called the first special session in June, Governor Perry set very clear priorities:

We're not going to talk about tuition revenue bonds, we're not going to talk about judicial pay raises, we're not going to talk about a telecom bill. We're not going to talk about anything until this is finished. None of those are going to be addressed until we address the most important issue in front of us… reforms of our schools and the property tax reduction.

In July, Lt. Governor Dewhurst promised to block all other legislation until there is a final agreement on school finance reforms and a tax bill to fund those reforms:

We're here to take care of school finance for the schoolchildren and parents and for the businesses of Texas… We want to go ahead and get Senate Bill 2, which is education reform, passed out of the Senate. We want to see the tax bill come over from the House and vote on that, and then I'll consider taking up those bills.

And just six days ago, Speaker Craddick made his recommendation to end the session:
We are wasting time and money, and it is unproductive to prolong this process.

We agree with the Speaker. As consumers, we strongly oppose the proposed telecom bills. As citizens, we resent lobbies' interests coming before our children. As Texans, we expect our leaders to keep their promises. Please don't let a lobby push a bad bill through today. Instead, let's talk and work together to create good laws for tomorrow.

Maida Barbour sent me a link to a piece about an "ooky" corpse exhibit, "Human Body World," at Mannheim's Museum of Technology and Work. It's essentially sculptures made with corpses, and according to the story, "religious and ethical critics say von Hagens has crossed an important line by treating the human body as something tantamount to a sculptor's clay." [Link]

BlogHer was, I gather from the reports I've read, a unique conference, possibly because it wasn't just the usual suspects having the usual conversations. I wasn't there, so I've been looking for a good overview; today I ran across a rich account of the conference at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review, written by Staci Kramer. Staci has some thoughts about why this conference was different:

It would be easy to ascribe the difference to the overwhelmingly female majority, but it goes deeper than that.

Part of it came from the cross-section of bloggers self-selected as participants or attending as invited panelists. We could -- and did -- break into smaller groups (one time slot was set aside for "birds of a feather" groups) but we were there for reasons that pulled us together more than they pulled us apart. Plus, we were determined to make it work.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation evidently attempted to buy Skype, but

...talks have broken down and Skype has denied it is for sale. But sources in the telecoms industry say they expect it to be taken over shortly.

Chris Pirillo's got a great idea for dealing with telemarketers: record and podcast their calls! He's posted about it here, with a funny example.

Get ready to adapt; Siberia appears to be melting, and if it is, the implications are far-reaching, according to an article in the UK Guardian:

It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.

The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication had a double issue in July, on Online Communities and Computer Mediated Collaborative Practices. Looks very rich. Thanks to Jim Downing for the pointer.

Word on the street is Technorati, David Sifry's innovative search engine for blogs, will be sold to "a large search engine company." You can count those using one hand; BL Ochman think it's Yahoo. I won't speculate (but if I did, I'd say Google). Then again, it's just a rumor.

Speaking of Sifry, he's posted an interesting "Blogs and Mainstream Media" chart (that speaks for itself):

This is the kind of data that makes Technorati so valuable.

Berners-Lee doesn't exactly say that the web was created for blogging in a recent BBC News interview, but he comes close. (Thanks, Dennis! [Link]

ML: I'm interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities. You weren't thinking car rental, you weren't thinking blogging, I assume.

TBL: Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

I've added a Feedburner syndication feed for Weblogsky. If you're reading via Atom or RSS and prefer Feedburner, here's the link so you can change your subscription.

Adina Levin's post on blog rank and popularity mentions "the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism." I'm ignoring the "male-centered" part as irrelevant, but coincidentally I was staring at my blogroll today and thinking it's obsolete. When blogrolls first appeared I felt they had value as pointers, because I was finding new blogs by clicking through others' blogrolls. That's no longer the case... I'm finding more new blogs than ever, without reference to blogrolls. I often don't even see a blogger's homepage, because I'm reading via aggregator or selecting a permalink that somebody posted. So I've taken my blogroll down. I still have uses for blogrolling.com, though - marginal links, like the music list I maintain in the right margin of Weblogsky.

Odd that Gödel, one of the three greatest logicians of all time, was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Barnard physicist and writer Janna Levin's writing a novel called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, about which she says "This is a story. Does that make it fiction? It's based on truth like all of our stories. It's a story of coded secrets and psychotic delusions, mathematics and war. It's a chronicle of the strange lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. These stories are so strange, so incredible, that they are totally unbelievable. Except they're true. And fact is more extraordinary than fiction." Edge.org has an excerpt from the book.

Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world ­ at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

JD Lasica's Darknet is a very good overview of the tumultous evolution of the perception of content and distribution as all media is digitized and increasingly available online, sometimes through legal channels but more often via the Darknet, i.e. file sharing networks of trust (not to be confused with the euphemistic label trusted computing). I'm leading a discussion with JD at Inkwell.vue on the WELL. If you want to join the conversation, you can send questions and comments to inkwell (at) well.com.

The Darknet, at bottom, is the collection of spaces where unauthorized or illegal file sharing takes place. Most media outlets use the Darknet in the narrow sense to refer to the private, secure, encrypted spaces online set up to exchange files without fear of detection -- sites like Blubster and WASTE and the new initiative Ian Clarke announced 2 weeks ago that will expand darknets from small groups of a few dozen people to potentially millions of people.

My book deals with these kinds of darknets, but also points out that Darknets in a wider sense refer to any kind of illicit file-sharing network -- including the years-old sneakernets on college campuses, where kids trade, buy and sell CDs and DVDs of movies and software downloaded from warez sites and the Internet; Usenet and IRC Chat, where strangers exchange files; and a new wave of legitimate darknet companies like Grouper and imeem and Outhink's Spin Xpress (which I'll bet most of you haven't heard of!).

Darknets are not evil -- at least in my book. They're the public's reaction to overly restrictive copyright laws and bass-ackwards media business models. In some ways, darknets are becoming the last bastion of the digital freedom fighters (alongside the folks who just want to snag free stuff). So it's a decidedly mixed bag.

Kinky Friedman is unhappy that some folks don't take his Texas gubernatorial campaign seriously, thinking it's an excuse to sell books, records, and Kinky paraphernalia. Well, I haven't doubted that he's serious, or that he could win, at least not lately. Texas voters are clearly frustrated, and even if Kinky wasn't serious when he started, he's heard enough by now to feel a sense of responsibility to those who're hoping he can make a difference. The New Yorker profiles Kinky and his campaign, and after reading the piece you'll either be horrified or (like me) hopeful that we'll have a governor that feels real.

The next leg of the campaign was a tour through the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Between fund-raisers, Kinky was dragged from his hotel across the street to the Bullring, a cavernous, mostly empty beer joint. Its owner, Ace Cook, a squat man with a yellowing walrus mustache, wanted to inform Kinky of his political philosophy.

"I'm for you," Cook said, sitting down to write the campaign a check. "I'm sick of these assholes who don't represent me, or represent people." By now, this sentiment had become a common refrain. "They represent A.T. & T. and Enron. How you gonna come and beg for my vote and then have nothing to do with me? Did Enron elect you or did I? I'm paying your salary, hoss. How'd it be if someone went up to the capitol and did what they said they would?"

"It'd be a first," the candidate said.

"I believe it, hoss," Cook said. "That's why you're gonna win."

The World Health Organization has been trying to prevent a global avian flu pandemic by sounding warnings and calling for action, funds, and the spread of information about the disease. We've all come to think of flu as a nonfatal disease, but flu can kill, and avian flu is particularly dangerous. Alex Steffen at WorldChanging.com is suggesting that bloggers sound the alarm this week, and call for "a bigger, wider and better debate about bird flu and its dangers."

Politicos and activists working overtime were unsuccessful in penetrating national denial about the nature and causes of the war in Iraq, but a single determined mother, driven by grief and a growing sense that something's not right, seems to be having an effect, despite attempts by (I'll say this tactfully) her critics to undermine her credibility. What Christopher Hitchens refers to as dreary sentimental nonsense is interpreted differently by Sheehan's many supporters, perhaps as an awakening of American conscience. Almost 1500 Americans have died in combat since the war begin in March 2003. The war was actually an American invasion of another country, which should have been shocking in itself, and it was justified by a lie (Sadaam's weapons of mass destruction), which definitely should have been shocking... and some were indeed shocked, a few asked hard questions about the war, but it seemed to fade into the background noise behind more compelling issues... whether Scott Peterson killed his wife Laci, whether Michael Jackson molested children at Neverland Ranch, whether athletes were pumping steroids, whether Brad left Jennifer for Angelina.... The war was over, after all, after Bush declared victory on that aircraft carrier, Saddam Hussein was dragged out of his hole, and the soldiers who opposed us were tucked safely away in prisons (subjected to a playful bit of demeaning torture, which almost shocked us, but not quite). As this War in Iraq has shriveled American morality and commitment to principle (no offensive wars, no torture by Americans, frank and honest democratic dialogue guiding our efforts), world opinion of the USA has grown dark and ugly. Meanwhile the Administration is fighting its own war - to cloak its own darker side (Karl Rove's machinations) and corruption within its party (Tom DeLay). We're riding down a slippery slope and we haven't quite hit bottom... meanwhile a grieving American mother, recovering from shock over her son's death and beginning to question why he was sent to war, feeling she's not getting answers that ring true, decides to camp out on the doorstep of the President's vacation home (a great spot, considering the long duration of his many vacations) and insist that he give her an answer that makes sense. And people start listening... after all, the Jackson and Peterson trials are done, and this seems like a pretty good, newsworthy show, so she's getting coverage. And bloggers have posted thousands of items. Other people – many others – are beginning to ask the same questions Cindy's asking, and perhaps sensing a buried truth – could it be that an American president has placed his interests, and his friends' intersests, above the interests of the American people?

Note: The war will have to end sooner or later as it's diminishing our resources. Retired General Barry McCaffery on NPR: "We probably have enough troops to regain control of the national capitol and the lines of communication. But at this point there are no more troops essentially to send....8 of 10 army divisions are in movement into the theater or out right now. Essentially 70% of our combat power has been deployed. We've called up--from this deployment 40% of that deployment is national guard or reserve. We're down to 3 to 5 brigades of the army and marine corps strategic reserves, and we are at and beyond our elastic breaking point."

Randy "Biscuit" Turner, as leader of the funk-punk-skate rock band the Big Boys, was a dominant force within Austin's punkadelic culture of the 1980s. Marc Savlov, in this week's cover story for the Austin Chronicle, writes "Turner's musical legacy has spread far and wide since its Eighties heyday, drawing into its orbit punk peers and progeny such as X's Exene Cervenka, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye, and Jersey spookster Glenn Danzig." He's known more today for his art than his music:

It's that seemingly ceaseless stream of mad-funkateer artwork as much as those growly punk rock pipes that has ensured Turner's enduring notoriety amongst the underground's forever fickle cognoscenti. Those explosions of Bizarro World hi-jinks frosted in daubs of blinding, Tokyo-esque neons and chockablock with cheerful chaos have done as much to keep Ausin weird as anything else the city has ever birthed.

I'm very saddened by the pain in the world and overjoyed at the mundane. That sly grin that people have. I can cry in a moment for people's joy, and I hope that reflects in my art – every facet of life's existence, the sad, the gothic, the funny-as-heck things that I do.
– Randy "Biscuit" Turner

Wednesday we recorded the first Balcones Fault Line Report, a talk show that Stephen Dulaney of Austin Podcasting Networkand I conceived. Our regular panel, besides Stephen and I, will include Catherine Crago and David Nuñez (who missed this first recording). Our first guess, Dr. Alex Cavalli, talked about the Digital Convergence Initiative that he's instigated. The two hour conversation will probably be podcast in two or three parts... watch this space, I'll post something when it's online. Meanwhile, if you're in Central Texas and care about Digital Convergence, be sure to attend the DCI Conference on September 22. (Register here.)

Online social network (OSN) platforms like Orkut, Friendster, Yahoo 360, etc. reputedly don't "work," though I can't think of one that's crashed and burned. However most people I know who join OSNs drift away more or less quickly. There's that initial surge of connection as you find or invite many people you know, but once you've done that there's often no compelling reason to stick around. There are exceptions, though, like Flickr, where the social network isn't an end in itself, but a means to another end, sharing and discussing photos.

In a private conversation, Ton Zjilstra pointed to a relevant post by Jyri Engeström on the case for object-centered sociality

the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.

Alan Ball's HBO series Six Feet Under is powerful and mysterious as life itself, and so difficult that I found myself complaining that I must be a masochist to be watching the final season of the series (which ends Sunday). A couple of episodes ago Nate, the lead character, died, and everybody else in the series is falling apart - major tragedy. But life is like that, and Six Feed Under is all about life's inexpicable leaps from comedy to tragedy and (sometimes) back again, and our attempts to throw a saddle that isn't real on a horse that doesn't exist. Somewhere in all that, there are unmistakable threads of wisdom. The Buddhist journal Tricycle once interviewed Ball about the parallels between his work and Buddhism (though he's not a Buddhist, just a Buddha). Now Salon's published an excellent interview explaining some of the thinking – and searching – that's gone into the series.

I'm not interested in writing characters who figure it out, and get it right, because I feel like that's too simplistic, and then you're writing about something that vaguely resembles life instead of writing about life. Because even if you figure out something, something bigger is going to come along that confuses the hell out of you. And for characters who are soulful and have a soulful connection to life ... One of the enduring themes of the series is that trying to figure out the right thing to do is such a mystery, it's so baffling. So many times when you do the quote right unquote thing, it makes your life harder, and you don't get rewarded for it. Then you get into the whole question of what is right and wrong. Is there a black-and-white universal right and wrong, or is there what's right for you, or is there what's right for people you love, or is there what's right for the global community? Life is infinitely complex and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

"Wikiwyg" is an even simpler form of wiki that's easy to use, I think. Then again, I thought wikis in general were easy to use, and I'm flubbergusted that so many people tell me otherwise. Give the demo a try before the link spammers show up.

A few days ago I argued that blogrolls no longer serve a useful purpose, and commented out my own "interesting people" list. Tish G. commented that "to newcomers, the blogroll is still very important. For many of us (I've been blogging since 11/04) it becomes a way of finding new voices," and Nick Lewis posted several reasons that he's still blogrolling. After reading those comments I put the blogroll back. Now to find time to make updates...

Hunter Thompson's wake was a great metaphor for his life. None of that "rest in peace" stuff. Not going gentle, is what it was...

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
— Hunter S. Thompson

My pal Ed Ward, who lives in a subdirectory nearby (and, physically, in Berlin), blogged a very nice piece about Randy "Biscuit" Turner's passing. [Link]

Writing "only looks easy." Chip Scanlan interviews the Chicago Tribune's Kevin Pang about the narrative structure of a recent story. Pang's only 24, but he's definitely got a handle on this writing thing. [Link]

Synth-pop and electronica fans should observe a moment of silence (or low volume, at least) for Robert Moog, creator of the Moog synthesizer, dead at 71. [Link]

The popularity of the synthesizer and the success of the company named for Moog took off in rock as extended keyboard solos in songs by Manfred Mann, Yes and Pink Floyd became part of the progressive sound of the 1970s.

"The sound defined progressive music as we know it," said Keith Emerson, keyboardist for the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer.


Along with rock, synthesizers developed since Moog's breakthrough helped inspire elements of 1970s funk, hip-hop, and techno.

My posting will be spotty for the next few days. I'll be joining my WorldChanging.com colleagues in Seattle for a retreat, and that trip will occupy much of my time through next Monday.

While we're sitting cool and comfortable at Nancy White's house in Seattle, Hurricane Katrina is blasting Louisiana and Mississippi – I'm watching insane reporters on television reporting from within the blast, and feeling a little relieved that the storm surge hasn't breached the levees. Last night I posted about the oncoming storm at WorldChanging.com, wondering how we can mitigate the impact of an ongoing series of cat 4 and 5 hurricanes driven by global climate change... I often wonder how many more major storms will strike Florida before the residents head for the hills... but I digress. The focus now is on New Orleans; Xeni's got a great summary post at boingboing, with updates. She points to the New Orleans Metroblog, where updates are posted from the scene. Word at the moment is that New Orleans has seen the worst of Katrina, but Mississippi's still slammed.

Some members of Flickr, the photo sharing community, are threatening to quit the scene if they're forced to join Yahoo's network. Yahoo bought Flickr recently, and the requirement for Flickrites to join Yahoo next year is part of the integration process. Thanks, Emily!. [Link]

At stake is a new user-profile stipulation that reads: "We will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo's network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo ID (or link your account to your Yahoo ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account."

Members' photos will be deleted if they later drop their account with the portal and search engine, disappointing some.

"This comes after many of us have invested so much time and effort; it makes it a chore to do anything except bend over, grab our ankles and smile," said Dana Smith, a San Francisco-based Flick Off supporter whose photographs rank among Flickr's most interesting material.

"If Flickr was honestly concerned about anything besides bank account size, then there would be zero point or purpose to force us into an account we did not originally agree to," Smith said.

Gal Beckerman in CJR Daily accused CNN of overdramatizing the impact of Katrina on New Orleans, portraying Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane expert from Louisiana State University, as a crackpot for describing potential problems with fire ants and toxic chemicals in the flood waters. Asks Beckerman, "Where do they find these guys? And why?"

In fact, van Heerden appears increasingly more credible as New Orleans floodwaters spread, and I have to wonder on what basis Beckerman trivializes van Heerden's comments. There's no reference to other experts refuting van Heerden, the unschooled evaluation of van Heerden's comments are Beckerman's own. Where does CJR find these guys?

NASA satellite photos show the New Orleans flood (with a "before" shot for comparison). The disaster just gets worse - a minute ago CNN was reporting a fire in the French Quarter, and there's "a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and still no clear sense of the death toll, though the mayor of New Orleans speculates that thousands may be dead. [Link]

• Link to Earth Observatory Images
• Link to Missing Persons Board
• Katrina Help Wiki
• Donate to the Red Cross