Several years ago I wrote a short piece about my favorite comic strip, Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published at bOING bOING DIGITAL while it was still a webzine, before it became the blog we all know and love. Today I was psyched to see a new appreciation of Little Nemo, written by Douglas Wolk, front and center at Salon. The occasion: publication of Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, a large format (and expensive, at $120) collection celebrating the 100th anniversary of the strip.

That was the joy of "Little Nemo" at its best, the thing that set it apart from McCay's other strips like "Little Sammy Sneeze" and "A Pilgrim's Progress," and even "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend": It didn't just evoke its readers' dreams, it seeped into them. Nemo is too small to act, really, and he doesn't understand the real world yet, let alone the subconscious world in which his desires and fears are made strangely real, and which he leaves by falling or drowning or being shaken into wakefulness by unfamiliar voices that become familiar as he opens his eyes. But McCay also realized that the dream world is a richly aestheticized one -- streamlined in its motives, stripped down to the things the conscious mind cares about most, and amplified into impossibility.

Another edit tussle at Wikipedia, this time over the history of podcasting. Adam Curry furtively removed a reference to Kevin Marks' role in podcasting's development, but as Kevin notes, he left an audit trail. Curry's site is down. Daniel Terdiman blogs about the fracas at news.com, saying Curry's been "podbusted." Curry says he "wasn't doing anything evil or posting that I had 'done it all. Merely participating in the process of Wikipedia to the best of my knowledge. Apparently that's not cool if you were a part of history." Depends on the changes you make... but we all know that none of these technologies can be credited to any one person, and the guy who does it first isn't necessarily the guy who does it best.

I don't think encapsulation of MP3 in RSS and the additional scripts that allow you to move podcasts automatically into your iTunes or iPod, wonderful as these breakthroughs have been, are the real story, anyway. You can find plenty of "podcasts" online that are really just mp3 files posted without encapsulation. The real news is that podcasting inspired broader understanding of the grassroots media potential of the Internet. (Thanks and a tip o' the hat to Ewan.)

I can't think how many conversations I've been in with other consultants and online entrepreneurs who've predicted the imminent death of social network platforms (like Friendster, Google, Orkut, Myspace, etc.) – and I note here that I'm going to call them social networks hereafter for convenience, though I think it's important to distinguish between the technical infrastructure, what I call the platform, and the social network, which is not technology but intangible connections between people. (I make that distinction so that danah boyd won't slap me upside the head; excuse the digression).

There's just no business model, the smart people say. I myself have suggested that social networks lack real juice unless they focus on some object (or obsession), like Flickr with photos.

While we're having these academic conversations, though, the social networks just keep coming, and growing. Now Business Week has a cover story about social networks, focusing especially on Buzz-Oven, which is based in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. When you sign up, you have to choose a region in the DFW area – and there's no option to select a birth year before 1950. Buzz-Oven, like the incredibly popular MySpace, tends to attract a younger audience. In fact the article title is "The MySpace Generation," though later in the article, the author refers to "Generation @," which was clever.

In a way it's exciting to see new, rich online technology applications mainstreaming to the extent that many high school and college adopters take them for granted the way we took the telephone for granted in the last half of the 20th Century. In fact there may be no business model in the sense that some of my colleagues think of business, where the enterprise is distant from its customers, seeing them as "consumers" and "market segments" and knowing them by their statistical behaviors in aggregate. You can't operate communities that way.

I had a vision for this almost 15 years ago, when Paco Nathan and I built FringeWare, Inc. as "a street market in cyberspace." We realized that sellers and buyers had become abstract entities with no real relationship. Stores became soulless interfaces where the people selling the merchandise were clerks with little investment in the business. We figured we could change that by making a community of sellers and buyers, and take profits from the transactions. That's partly what we did, anyway... our vision of online commerce horrified the bankers we talked to. This was before the web existed and before there were secure methods for processing online payments; in fact we had to open a physical store before we were allowed to process credit cards. But, at least for a while, we were getting products from members of our community and selling them to other members. We also published FringeWare Review, a magazine with mail order catalog in the back pages. Through our email list and articles and eventual web site, our customers came to know us pretty well.

It's great to think that we can integrate communities and markets this way, and the potential's there. It can work even if many are strictly-business bottom-line about it, because all markets, including community markets, have people like that - they tend to glue things together. What could kill the goose, though, is greed. That almost happened in 2000, but we recovered because those of us who're passionate about online publishing, commerce, and community wouldn't stop what we were doing, even when we weren't being paid to do it (hence the blog phenomenon). Now we're getting paid again, and that's nice, but we don't have to become zillionaires, it's just not sustainable. A few million would be okay.

But I digress – or ramble – getting back to the Business Week piece... it wouldn't be much of a Weblogsky post if I didn't blockquote something:

Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year's peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline -- if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages "person-to-person, which is more credible," says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them.

CNN's web site has an article about John Seigenthaler's issues with a Wikipedia article's inaccurate statements. The article notes that the false statement was removed and a registration requirement added for posting new articles (though I didn't think that was new). [Link to the article]

According to the article, "The episode demonstrates the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet....Unlike content included in magazines, books and other traditional media, online material can be submitted by just about anyone, often without having to volunteer any identifying information." Ha! CNN's reporter managed to slip in a bit of FUD about the wicked Internet, where anything goes. In one sentence, anonymity is the problem; in the next sentence, it's the lack of editorial authority, the supposed vetting of articles in "traditional media," without regard to anonymity.

I could go on for hours about that one... the implicaiton that "traditional media" is more trustworthy. Think about Fox News, or Judith Miller. Journalists have a code of ethics and a methodology that I respect (I did time in journalism school, so I know how it's supposed to work). However years of experience have taught me that "traditonal" sources are often unreliable. It's better to get your information from many, often conflicting, sources, as you can find online.

What's really funny about this CNN article, though, is that it has no byline. It's anonymous.

Investors are rediscovering the Internet... to paraphrase the George of the Junge chorus, "watch out for that boom!" Here's a piece about a new private equity fund called RSS Investors and their first investment - in a company with an RSS network, natch. [Link]

Nancy posts about Lisa Williams' discovery that Craig Newmark is a real person! However, sez Craig, "I’d like to assure everyone that I don’t exist, but who does, these days."

In a cool bit of convergent biotech, a project at the University of Missouri is experimenting with a method for "printing" organs based on a study of multicellular self-assembly. "The knowledge gained from these studies will serve as biological validation for new methods for building three-dimensional living structures of specific geometries....In the course of this project we anticipate that we will discover new principles of multicellular self-organization (morphogenesis, organogenesis), which in turn will enable us to develop functional biological structures for basic science purposes (e.g., in vitro studies of mechanisms of development and tumor formation), and applications such as targeted drug testing and delivery, and organ (module) replacement." According to Wired News, "they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer."

Here's how it works: A customized milling machine prints a small sheet of bio-paper. This "paper" is a variable gel composed of modified gelatin and hyaluronan, a sugar-rich material. Bio-ink blots -- each a little ball of cellular material a few hundred microns in diameter -- are then printed onto the paper. The process is repeated as many times as needed, the sheets stacked on top of each other.

Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops. The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions. The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.

Tony Carr, David Horwitz, and Stephen Marquard from the University of Cape Town's Centre for Educational Technology were in Austin for a conference, and dropped by Polycot for a visit with Honoria Starbuck and I today. They were in town for the Fourth Sakai Conference, so we talked about the Sakai Project, a Java framework for educational technologies. We also talked quite a bit about the effective use of blogs and wikis in educational environments. The meeting was a blast, We're looking forward to their online conference, Emerge 2006, next July.

This could be a great little business on the side... NASA's looking for private companies to fly cargo and crew to the international space station... 2001 is a little late, but it's coming! Jeff Bezos clearly saw this coming. [Link]

Hossein (Hoder) Derakshan, an active and insightful blogger originally from Iran but living now in Toronto, has posted his Goodbye to America. The Border Patrol googled his blog, talked to him at length, and evidently decided that he was attempting to take up residence in NYC. They won't let him come back for at least six months.

Now the result is that, apparently, I can't visit the States at least for six months and even after that I should prove I'm established enough in Canada. I also have to explain why I failed to register my departure when the bus driver didn't stop while crossing the US border to Canada....It's sad to see America is not the land of the free anymore.

My blog post "CNN on Wikipedia and the wicked Internet" drew criticism over a private email list I'm on after I posted it there. The complaint was that I was "making light" of Seigenthaler's issue - that he had been defamed by a scurrilous article posted to Wikipedia – I won't get into the content of the article here, but you can read Seigenthaler's response at USA Today's site.

My post was not about Seigenthaler, but about the CNN article, which decried "the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet," and when on to say that "unlike content included in magazines, books and other traditional media, online material can be submitted by just about anyone, often without having to volunteer any identifying information." I probably read too much into that last sentence, but I read it to mean that the problem is not so much anonymity, but broad participation in the media conversation by non-experts who may sometimes be anonymous, and who post with no editors or fact-checkers to vet the supposed facts. I challenged the assertion that traditional media is inherently more reliable than the Internet, which, taken as a whole, is an aggregation of many voices and perspectives, where the facts may be wrong here and there and there may be no single authoritative voice, but where exposure to a multiplicity of sources may take us closer to the always-elusive truth. I also asserted my respect for journalists and their practices and ethics, because the many voices on the Internet are a balance, but not a replacement for journalistic discipline.

I should have made all that clearer, though the complaint I was hearing was that I "made light" because I noted the irony that an article complaining about anonymity online ran at CNN's site without a byline. That made me laugh, but I clearly wasn't laughing at Seigenthaler, whose complaint was real and deserved the attention it's been getting elsewhere.

Here's part of my response to the email, offered because it says more about my own thinking, fwiw:

I was also rather surprised to hear that Wikipedia had not previously required a login to post or edit an article. I had always assumed that was the case, and I thought in the rare instances that I had added to or updated the site, I was required to log in. On the other hand, I've never assumed that Wikipedia or similar collaborative publications would be considered an authoritative source of information. I've argued that the advantage of the Internet as it's been evolving in the era of social and collaborative systems and the 'blogosphere' is not that it gives us authoritative voices, but that it gives us many perspectives from which to synthesize our sense of what's real.

Certainly "the lack of accountability that often comes with articles posted by anonymous people over the Internet" is something that should be discussed, though I think (as I mentioned to Mark Dery yesterday in a discussion of this same issue) that the answer is not in the suppression of speech but in an educational focus on media literacy and the need for critical skepticism about all sources, including those that claim to be authoritative.

I also believe that the response to bad speech is more speech, and I applaud Mr. Seigenthalers's aggressive contradiction of the false claims about his past and his contstructive criticism of Wikipedia.

Yesterday Ed Ward acknowledged the anniversary of John Lennon's murder with a piece that's more history than celebration – Ed is critical of Lennon's music, and I think most would agree that Lennon never did great work after he left the Beatles. It could be that his genius worked in a particular context, not just as part of a group but as part of a particular milieu that slipped from his reach as he grew increasingly famous, rich, and isolated. Ed makes a good point at the end of his post:

I've mellowed slightly in my feelings about Lennon, but I remain firm in believing that groups are more than the sum of their parts, and leaving for a solo career, nine times out of ten, means that the quality of your art is about to go down precipitously. None of the ex-Beatles were close to what they'd been as Beatles. That includes John, his posthumous deification notwithstanding. And since I know that's going to piss people off, I invite the pissed-off to examine their relationship to nostalgia, the most destructive and limiting way to look at art you've experienced, since it usually means you've found a way to seal yourself off from the reality of both the art of the past and of the present.

Bruce Sterling is ending his year as visionary in residence at Art Center College of Design, leading a course on the "New Ecology of Things." He's blogged images of his own class project, a massive mobile, which "is a pre-digital 'ecology of things,' since it's a nonlinear, interactive cascade of levers. And design is also an 'ecology of things'. Thus my edifying lecture on the subject, which is made out of steel wire, foamboard and PVC pipe. It's dangling in midair as I type this."

Great quote from Mike Wallace, who can't get an interview with George W., and no wonder. When asked by a Boston Globe reporter what he would ask given the chance, he doesn't pull punches:

What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us, which is cool, given that Jeremy Zawodny says Yahoo plans "to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community," as it did with Flickr. Yahoo now owns two of the most innovative services to've launched since the turn of the century. If you don't know what this is about, check out The Inuitive Life Business Blog's interview with experts on the subject "what's so cool about del.icio.us." [Link]

Another useful link from Nancy: this is a web site for the growing army of people who start and manage email list. Email's is the Internet's killer app, and it's increasingly complex and demanding. This site also has a FAQ for list members, incidentally, as well as a General Tips and Info FAQ. The FAQs are actually blogs that allow comments. [Link]

The Global Voices London Summit today gave the GV bloggers a chance to meet and talk about the state and future of the GV web site, including a chance to give feedback to site wizard Boris Anthony and the inevitable discussion of blogging relative to journalism. Dean Wright from Reuters, who was part of that discussion via videoconference, expressed an interest in working with bloggers. Dina Mehta talked about the Southeast Asian Earthquake and Tsunami blog... I'm still reading, there's a wealth of information in the record of the event, and this was just one day (as Ethan commented, it should have been three).

Global Voices is important, perhaps essential. The USA is in a state of economic decline, and the developing world is growing. Balance depends on understanding and collaboration, and you won't get the communication to support that from traditional media or politicians. It'll come from ordinary people in extraordinary times, publishing their thoughts and perspectives via the blogosphere.

I have severe binocular vision accompanied by bouts of cognition, so I'm thinking to ask my doctor about Panexa by Merd. (Via Sivacracy)

John Shirley's seen the new King Kong (via bOING bOING) and posted a review at JohnShirley.net. Mark has a good quote from the review, but I like the last paragraph:

And when King Kong dies--that's going to be our end too, don't you see. We're apes, who're going to fall on the pavement, shot down by “civilization.”

Austin Wireless Board Meeting was tonight; Rich MacKinnon and I are on board for another term. We acknowledged that some of the novelty has worn off with wireless; in Austin we've been operating hot spots long enough that the people who use 'em have come to take 'em for granted (until they visit other cities that are not as unwired). Over the last year the organization put other initiatives aside as we worked with the Save Muni Wireless coalition to educate the public about legislation that would prohibit municipal networks in Texas. Following that, some were involved in projects related to the evacuation of New Orleans and technical infrastructure to connect evacuees who'd been separated. Over the next year we'll have meetings, events, and projects, probably working more with other organizations like IC², Austin Wireless Alliance, Austin Technology Incubator, and EFF-Austin. Maybe it's time to build a mesh network?

Virgin Galactic is building its spaceport in New Mexico, not far from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Spaceport, which will be near Van Horn, Texas. It ain't science fiction anymore... and I suspect the arid desert where I grew up will be crawling with space entrepreneurs in a few more years. I used to have a job painting oil rigs, maybe I can go back and paint spaceships.

Back in the 90s, when I was associate editor of the 'zine version of boing boing, I wrote an appreciation of 50s science fiction/horror films called "Monsters from the Id," basically a top ten list with a bit of context. It was too long for the zine, so the version that appeared was only about a third of the whole piece. In a clear response to overwork and general angst, I've dusted it off, added some links, and published it here at the site. Enjoy! [Link]

The Senate failed to reauthorize the Patriot Act as is, though a House/Senate compromise bill may still have a chance of passage before the Act's December 31 expiration date. That bill includes safeguards that weren't part of the orignal. It appears that legislators are hearing from constituents who value liberty in the defense of liberty over surveillance in the defense of liberty. [Link]

Via J.D.: Jason Boog at Ziff-Davis' Publish writes about Darknets vs. Lightnets, following on J.D.'s book Darknet : Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation book:

A Darknet is a hidden Web nook where a small group shares digital files. Lightnet refers to a theoretical push towards an Internet where sharing and remixing files is encouraged.

Boog quotes web developer Lucas Gonze, who says "in a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text. Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog....Publishers will give away some content in order to be able to sell other content, and they will find new revenue sources when they become remixers themselves." I.e. smart media companies will be thinking outside the pre-digital "intellectual property" box of concepts. The Digital Convergence track we're putting together for SXSW Interactive this year will address this in a couple of panels.

Wiley does Kermit the Frog. [Link]

Looks like Santarchy is getting ugly, with drunken Santarchists rampaging in Auckland. While researching this imiportant story, I discovered there'd been a Santa Rampage in Austin just a few days ago at the Driskill Hotel... less whacky, though, than the New Zealand rampage, where "the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an overpass."

the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on office buildings.

One man climbed the mooring line of a cruise ship before being ordered down by the captain. Other Santas, objecting when the man was arrested, attacked security staff, who were later treated by paramedics....

David Weinberger blogs about SiteAdvisor, a software company that indexes web-based security threats of various kinds, including spyware, viruses, phishing, etc. Sounds very cool from David's description. [Link]

SA has set up a slew of machines that crawl the Web, download whatever software they can find, and sign up for every email offer. They then run the downloaded software on virtual machines and note exactly what gets installed and how the registry is altered. They make up a unique email address for each site and note how many messages they get as a result. They also analyze the links to see if sites are part of nasty affiliate networks.

They then make all that information public via a Creative Commons license. You can go to the SA site and see exactly what will happen if you download software from an unknown Web site.

I've been talking a lot about Wikipedia lately. I don't consider myself an expert on Wikipedia, but I think I get some of the issues that are cropping up after the Curry and Seigenthaler flaps. In case you missed those, Adam Curry changed a Wikipedia item on podcasting and John Seigenthaler complained bitterly about a Wikipedia article that referred to his possible involvement in the Kennedy Assassination (which is absurd; this was evidently an ill-conceived prank). These flaps turned up the volume on discussions of Wikipedia's accountability for its contents. If bad facts appear in Wikipedia, who do you blame? In traditional publishing, you blame the publisher, and that's justified because the publisher has a system for collecting, vetting, and editing content before it's published. However Wikipedia has volunteer editors who review articles and updates after they're posted, not before. The actual contributors can be anybody, and until recently they could be anonymous (though generally traceable through their IP numbers). It's a decentralized system where no single person or entity is clearly accountable for what's posted, yet it works – you've probably heard about Nature's investigation showing that Wikipedia, overall, is about as accurate as Brittanica.

Wikipedia is now requiring authentication for new posts, though you can make still anonymous updates to existing content. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's fearless leader, has said he doesn't want to pursue strong verification of identity, and that Wikipedia should be assessed on the quality of the content, and not identity or reputation.

Is Wikipedia an authoritative source? The Nature study suggests accuracy comparable to Brittanica's – and what source of information will ever be wholly authoritative? Wikipedia actually has advantages: bringing collective intelligence to bear means more minds and more perspectives are represented, and this would tend to mitigate bias. Wikipedia is also more current, and has articles on subjects you would never find in Brittanica. However there's always going to be lag between publication and editorial review, and in some cases (like Seigenthaler's) bad information will find its way into an article and linger. I wouldn't consider Wikipedia a single authoritative source (though I often use it as a reference, and link to its articles).

(BTW, fans of Wikipedia should note there's a fund drive under way.)

Vincent Schiavelli died of lung cancer in Sicily, where he'd been living ... and cooking! (He was evidently a terrific chef.) I first recall seeing him in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as Frederickson – he looked so strange I thought he'd been, er, altered in some way. As the Master Thespian sez, "ACTING!" My favorite Schiavelli role: John O'Conner, a Red Lectroid in "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai." (Thanks to Mark for the pointer.)

Texas is officially a disaster area (especially since Republicans like Rick Perry are a little sensitive about disaster response these days). This time it's not a hurricane, but more than 70 wildfires across the state, according to CNN. We haven't seen any fires around Austin so far, but we're definitely dry these days – lake levels are 'way down and water conservation is already becoming an issue as we experience one of the driest years on record. Temporarily back in Austin after a year in California, Bruce Sterling blogged about the Austin Statesman's "typical climate change article that numbly fails to cite climate change." Meanwhile cedar pollen's hitting the air, which means that some of us can't breathe even if we're not on fire yet.

Eudora was my email client for years, then Netscape Communicator, before I fell into a couple of corporate jobs that forced me to use Outlook. I was looking for a way out until Outlook 2003 came along; it was very good, so I lived with various issues (like storage in the proprietary pst format) until Thunderbird came along as a well-regarded Open Source alternative. I stalled on making the transition, but Outlook became slow and crashy, and eventually cratered, evidently due to a corrupt pst file. I took the opportunity to make the move, and I've been pretty satisfied with Thunderbird since then, though it's not as robust as Outlook. Give it time.

One thing that irritates me, though, is Thunderbird's handling of spam. The junk mail controls are limited (basically an on/off switch), and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there's a bunch more that the filters miss. I spend way too much time "training" by marking mails as junk, yet I seem to get the same kinds of spam over and over. I almost never see false positives, which is good, but I'm not clear why the filtering is not more successful, and I can't find much by way of documentation, just as there's no real tweaking of the junk mail controls. I've looked for additional spam-blocking products, but what I find are products created specifically to work with Outlook.

I shouldn't complain, since so much of my spam is filtered successfully, but since junk mail handling is supposed to be a key feature of Thunderbird, I'd love for it to be more useful.

The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here.

One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's
article in Wired, and having been acknowledged and explained, it's better understood by more people.

The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom).

Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them.

If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^)

Lots of talk about Google's relationship with AOL following Google's purchase of 5% of the ailing mega-ISP. Essentially what Google bought is more influence on AOL, which was already a Google partner. AOL seen through Google's eyes would appear as a lot of strategic servers and a substantial load of users. (Sometimes I think Google is a government operating as a business....)

UPDATE: Sad news: I had to uninstall Spamato; it was interfering with Thunderbird's ability to send mail. It was promising, but not quite ready for heavy-user prime time.

In response to my rant about spam, online friend and sysadmin wiz Bryan Venable sent me a few potential solutions, the first of which was a new GPL spam filter sysetem called Spamato, which plugs into several different email clients, including Thunderbird. It's beta, but works pretty well, certainly better than Thunderbird's own system. Spamato lets you choose any or all of several methods to filter spam, and sends all the bad stuff into a spamato mailbox where you can check for false positives. There's some overhead - you have to have Java installed, and you have to specify the location of your Java_Home (which sounds geeky, but clear instructions are immindently googlable). You have to enable for each install, and that takes a little time, and while it's happening you can't do much else. It also comes with annoying sounds turned on by default; you'll want to turn that off quickly. When I first turned it off, I missed the 'save' button for the sound configuration and thought it wasn't working - look carefully, it's at the bottom of the display.

Anyway, fingers crossed - I hope this is a winner.

Getting spam after spam about Koko Petroleum? The Koko folks say they have nothing to do with it.

The appropriate regulatory bodies as well as our legal counsel have been requested to take steps to prevent the Spam emails.

There are no undisclosed material facts in regard to the company.

Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Technical complications which may arise could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above.

Here's a year-end list, since I've been listing to a lot of music and seldom blog about it... an elderly grandfather's best music of the year, in no particular order, and this doesn't count all the older stuff I was listening to... a ton of Miles Davis, for instance. I also want to honorably mention Austin's own Eliza Gilkyson and her Paradise Hotel, which has a particularly great track, "Man of God."

Beck - Guero: Hoppin' that's hip.

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine: Passionate, clever, hard to classify.

Bruce Springsteen - Devils and Dust: Americana, a kind of 21st century Woody Guthrie piece.

Dave Douglas - Keystone: Oddly enough, a tribute to Fatty Arbuckle. Dave Douglas is the best embodiment of the spirit of Miles.

Kanye West - Late Registration: Great album; what sold me was his gig on Saturday Night Live, with strings.

Rodney Crowell - The Outsider: This was a surprise - Dylan-influenced rock from a singer/songwriter usually considered country. Thanks to the guys at KUT for playing this til it sunk in.

The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema: Great pop, tinged with psychedelia. One of my very favorites.

Sleater-Kinney - The Woods: Their earlier stuff never quite grabbed me, but this just rocks.

Nortec Collective - Tijuana Sessions #3: Unique south of the border techno jams.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Howl: Retro acoustic folk that just works. I don't know their earlier stuff, but those who do say this was quite a departure.

My Morning Jacket - Z: Melodic hoppin' pop with rich arrangements.

Gorillaz - Demon Days: A weird kind of funk-pop-hiphop collection. My grandson turned me onto this... now it's a favorite.

White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan: Pretty wild, all that sound coming from two people. Wild, all over the map, great rock and roll.

One more year-end post: a list of some of the more interesting Weblogsky posts throughout the year. This was painful to do, mainly because I saw various errors, mostly sloppy html, especially around blockquotes. <grin>

Thanks for reading, and for your occasional comments.

January 2005
Tagsonomy and "out of control": Social tagging.

February 2005
We're Only In It for the Money: ethics of blogging.
Journalists Killed in Iraq: Eason Jordan's suggestion, at the World Economic Forum, that journalists had been targeted by U.S. troops.

March 2005
Perspective on Multimedia: a piece on media convergence, actually written in 2004.
Municipal Broadband: Access for All: Texas Legislature's proposed prohibition of municipal networks.

April 2005
Workaholics: people who work 60-80 hours a week may not actually be working... then again, what's work?

May 2005
Stormy Weather: not real weather, but economic weather.

June 2005
Echo Chambers: strong partisanship creates echo chambers.
DemocracyFest 2005: my take on a progressive political conference.
Group Relationship Management: when you think of CRM as constituent relationship management, in NGO and political worlds, you also need another layer for managing group relationships. A second GRM post here.
Identity Metasystem: a proposed framework for handling identity across the Internet.
Social Networking Doesn't Work?: critique of a CNet piece on social network platforms.

July 2005
Dvorak on Creative Commons: he gets it so wrong.
Object-Centered Sociality: online social networks should have a purpose other than hanging out.
Cindy Sheehan, War and Denial: Sheehan overcomes ongoing denial about the U.S. war in Iraq.
Terrorists and the Internet: "What should we do?"

September 2005
Heard in today's news: one of many posts about Katrina, this one about Mike Brown's gaffe – "FEMA had no idea the New Orleans Convention Center was housing thousands of refugees who'd been without food or drink for 100 hours."

October 2005
A personal note: reassessing.

November 2005
The cost of war: a rant about Ken Mehlman's "lies and half-truths" (per Joshua Micah Marshall) about the war in Iraq.
Blogging Enterprise: notes on a public appearance. Some related background notes in a post on Identity Crisis.

December 2005
Business Week on Generation @: more about social networking.