I just finished attending the two-day Freedom to Connect conference, which was a very good and very important conference, but I'm feeling tired and thinking about all the stuff I need to be doing back home, coincidentally running across a post by Caterina Fake that reflects some of what I've been thinking the last couple of days...

There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer.

Meanwhile though I'm pretty exhausted after a hyperactive SXSW experience and this conference following close afterward, I'm talking about putting together some workshops and conferences over the next year, but that's probably crazy since there are only so many hours in the week. And we're pretty busy at Polycot (Austin isn't exactly blazing with Web 2.0 hype-driven activity at the moment, though that seems to be happening in other places based on Caterina's notes...

It's crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn't going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they're going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I'm getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it's impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).

In Austin there's only a few companies that are attentive to the "web 2.0" stuff, and they're developers, not people starting new companies. New web companies aren't that common there, though that might happen. I might even be an instigator because I keep wanting to push economic development, which could be development of authentic businesses but could also produce a lot of bubbly stuff. We just have to avoid fallilng into some kind of manic phase, and build solid business and compelling technology.

I'm actually optimistic, just tired at the moment...

Over the last busy month or so, in addition to conferences and meetings and Polycot work, I made final touches on my contributions to the WorldChanging book, A User's Guide for the 21st Century. My piece of the book is about network politics and online tools for amplifying your voice. The book will be released January 1, 2007. [Link]

TrendWatching.com's April briefing is on the trend formerly known as READY-TO-KNOW, now renamed INFOLUST. Just when you thought you knew everything... [Link]

Show us one experienced, switched-on consumer in a mature consumer society who does NOT google once a day. Or even once an hour. One consumer who has NOT researched the cheapest available fare, price, charge before buying a big ticket item. Who has NOT invested some time reading reviews, recommendations and suggestions from experts and fellow consumers on anything from hotels in Paris and designer vacuum cleaners to which specific seat to request on flight SQ220 from Sydney to Singapore. One who hasn't relished the feeling of being better informed about everything from 18th century gardening to alternative medicine to the real reasons for high oil prices, than his/her peers or, even better, his/her superiors.

All thanks to the insanely expansive and detailed web of information that continues to be spun, offering transparency of prices, of reviews, of opinions, and of detail. Yes, you’ve heard this before. But just for a moment, marvel at how incredibly addicted consumers have become to getting instant access to any kind of useful and relevant information. In fact, consumers are experiencing nothing short of an all-encompassing INFOLUST....

Bill O'Reilly interviewed danah boyd about myspace.com March 30; danah's posted the video at YouTube. She does a good job explaining the myspace phenomenon - kids want to hang out at myspace with people they know, they're not there to meet strangers. In fact, they generally ignore adults and strangers, and avoid risky situations. O'Reilly mentions a 16 year old girl who was arrested for putting a nude photo of herself online, and danah says she might've been looking for a date or attention from adults, but something like that would be rare. (Oddly, O'Reilly says the girl put a photo of herself in an unregulated space, but the fact that she's been charged with a crime sorta contradicts this view of a "lawless" Internet where anything goes... but you knew that.) [Link]

YouTube's success as an online aggregator of video snippets suggests that digital convergence is the wave of the present. However the system still faces challenges, [Link]

Others see potentially troublesome similarities between YouTube and the original Napster file-sharing service, which made it easy to download free music, often illegally. It was sued and eventually shut down for rampant copyright violations.

Like Napster, YouTube is totally free. It is also filled with video cribbed from TV shows and movies - clips that violate copyrights.

YouTube "has a strong position right now, but we'll have to see how much staying power it really has," said Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble.com, a startup offering a way to track all the video cropping up on the web. "You can't help but wonder whether YouTube will eventually lose its audience the way Napster did."

I haven't been blogging as much at Weblogsky, and that's partly because I was distracted by my involvement in a couple of conferences, and partly because I've been posting more at WorldChanging.com and at Polycot's blog. At Polycot I'd been like a shoeless cobbler's child; we were so busy doing actual work that it took us forever to build a web site with our own framework/CMS, and that was finally completed a few weeks ago. We integrated WordPress, and I'm blogging Polycot-relevant posts there (i.e. posts about web technology, user experience, social technology, ecommerce, web site development. etc.). Also hope to blog more at Smart Mobs, a site that's more relevant than ever now that the combined technical and social changes Howard was writing about in his great book.

Sorting out time and projects so that everything's done, and done well, is always a challenge. I just read a quote from the always wise, always eloquent Dalai Lama that's relevant:

Before we do anything, we should always ask ourselves whether we will be able to do it properly and complete it. If the answer is no, we should not start. Leaving tasks uncompleted creates a habit for the future. So once we have begun something, we should be sure not to go back on our decision. Self-confidence is not to be confused with pride. Pride is thinking highly of oneself without good reason. Self-confidence is knowing that one has the ability to do something properly and being determined not to give up. Ordinary beings are prepared to make a good deal of effort for relatively insignificant ends. We have promised to work for the immensely more important goal of liberating all beings, so we should cultivate great self-confidence, thinking, Even if I am the only one to do so, I will benefit all beings. --The Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night

I just posted a response to comments about the net neutrality issue following my recent post at WorldChanging.com. I'm repeating what I posted here because I think it's an important point:

The real issue here is about vision: what is the Internet for? Many of us have begun to see it as a kind of public utility equally available to all - abundantly available. Some would like to see it primarily as a conduit for content that is relatively scarce, therefore expensive. We now have an enforced, artificial scarcity of broadband service, which is why it tends to be expensive. In other countries, people are paying the equivalent of twenty bucks for service that's ten times fatter/faster.

Network operators here, especially incumbent telcos who are losing voice service to VOIP technology, want to remain profitable and to maximize their profits. If they find the most obvious way to do so is to control and constrain the Internet, they'll do it - not because they're evil people, but because their charge is to maximize profit. The two ways suggested to keep them in check are market forces and legislation. The reason legislation seems necessary is that the telcos, formerly part of a monopoly, still think like a monopoly, and use effective and expensive lobbying to stifle competiton.

Maida's convinced me that we should treat this like a national holiday, even though the name's not quite the same. However various and sundry folks have called me Lebowski over the years, beginning with my 7th grade PE coach and, of course, everybody else who was in that class. Especially my pal Pinky (and I should tell you how he got his nickname!)

The Coen Brothers can do no wrong, in my opinion, and The Big Lebowski would be a favorite even if it hadn't added all those lame jokes to the little vortex swirling around my life (they're good for convesation). In my old age I've grown more like The Dude, and I've adopted his devotion to comfortable fashion, so I'll probably be a good fit for Lebowski Fest. I wonder if they'll let me in for free if I change my name?

Link Lebowski Fest

SXSW Interactive has posted the mp3 of the 2006 session called Convergence and Transformation: A Whole New Creative World. I was invited onto the panel at the last minute; it was one of the best panel experiences I've had... [Link to the MP3]. The session was moderated by Catherine Crago, and included David Pescovitz, David Michel-Davies, and John Tolva.

Bruce Sterling discovers a new literary form... "the idea of using search engines for Burroughsian cut-up material is hairy." Amen, brother. [Link]

'The initial aesthetics of Flarf went largely unarticulated, but they can probably be approximated by the following recipe: deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts, often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile.'

Jock Gill posted, at GreaterDemocracy.org, a brief history of the collision of politics and social software in 2004, including notes from the Demcomm group that formed to advise the Kerry campaign on the potential to build communities of supporters using online tools. (The Kerry campaign didn't take the advice). I was part of the Demcomm group, along with Howard Rheingold, Nanci Meng, Tex Coate, and several others. We created a draft plan, and

We never heard back. We could only watch as Kerry imposed a traditional, asymmetrical, industrial era Master/Slave broadcast communications organizing principal on his campaign. Kerry did not trust the voters to generally do the right thing most of the time. Thus he was basically unable to leverage cooperative gain created by the collective actions of his supporters at the edges of his campaign. Kerry only understood power as it is ceated by asymmetrical relationships. This lead him to treat his supporters as sheeple, not as citizen activists.

There is an implied belief among many that there was tremendous agreement inside the Dean Campaign to take the Peer-to-Peer path over the Master-Slave model -- this simply was not true. It was a fight every day keep the master/slave beast at bay. In hindsight the miracle was that we held it off as long as we did given how many inside and outside the campaign relished master/slave over peer-to-peer.

I'm sad to report the death last Friday of my friend and mentor, Tom Ferguson, MD. Tom had dedicated his life to expanding the patient's role in medical care. He edited a magazine and book called Medical Self-Care, and later the online Ferguson Report, as well as an aggregation of content at DocTom.com, where he was blogging. His last post was March 31.

Tom and I first connected in the early 1990s, at one of the first EFF-Austin meetings. He saw early on the role the Internet could play in medicine, especially how it could empower patients and create new ways for patients to interact with those responsible for their treatment. Most recently, Tom had been working on the concept of the e-patient, where e stands for empowered. Tom had been ill for quite a while, and this increased his empathy for the patient's role. Others will carry on his work, hopefully leading to more of a partnership of patient with physician in the future of medicine.

Here's a horror story of sorts: Claire Miller, a Manhattan publishing exec, started getting "steady onslaught of unsolicited and lusty phone calls, e-mail messages and even late-night visits from strange men – typically seeking delivery on dark promises made to them online by someone, somewhere, using her name." According to Tom Zeller in the New York Times, Miller is the victim of cyberstalking, which is recently a crime. In the Times story, Parry Aftab of WiredSafety.org describes cyberstalking as "the hidden horror of the Internet." At first glance, WiredSafety.org appears to be the best kind of approach to online safety: it's chock full of information about potential online safety issues and ways to prevent and respond. There's a companion site at WiredCops.org, "a network of law enforcement officers, who specialize in cybercrime investigation, training other law enforcement officers and who assist cybercrime victims online." There's also WiredKids.org and an Internet Super Heroes site, all related to WiredSafety. What's cool about these programs is that they bring the community together to deal with bad behavior online, avoiding heavy-handed regulatory measures and restrictions.

The Planetary society's funded the world's first optical SETI ("search for extraterrestrial intelligence") telescope at Harvard. [Link]

Alien civilizations are thought by many to be at least as likely to use visible light signals for communicating as they are to use radio transmissions. Visible light can form tight beams, be incredibly intense, and its high frequencies allow it to carry enormous amounts of information. Using only Earth 2006 technology, a bright, tightly-focused light beam, such as a laser, can be ten thousand times as bright as its parent star for a brief instant. Such a beam could be easily observed from enormous distances.

Arthur Lee, leader of the great 60s-70s band Love, is fighting leukemia (but, then again, he's always been a fighter). Note that Love has a page on Myspace - if you're not familiar with the band, you can get acquainted there, or at the band's web site. Love's album "Forever Changes" might be the best rock album ever. [Link]

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too – yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

The witless new Wonkette (supposedly an attorney named David Lat, and I wanna know why they didn't change the name of the blog to "Wonk") is no fun, and even worse, he (she? it?) is into posting smears, tossing mud and muck at "Red State" Democrat Mark Warner, rumored to be considering a presidential bid. Maybe the Wonk (who blogged formerly as "Article III Groupie" at Underneath Their Robes, likes to sling mud for exercise (Ana Marie says she left Wonkette because she was tired of sitting), or maybe he's partisan. It could be, though, that he's trying to clear the way for the presidential race of his dreams:

I have a weakness for dramatic, intriguing figures, and strong, powerful, brilliant women. So my favorite Bush administration official is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and my favorite senator is Hillary Rodham Clinton. If Hillary and Condi ever face each other in some race -- for example, a presidential race, as Dick Morris has fantasized about -- I will pretty much drop dead from sheer excitement.

Mitch Kapor is blogging about "a movement for fundamental political change," where he says

What's worse, there is a conventional wisdom which tells us that there are no viable alternatives to the unacceptable ones in front of us. Everyone I've ever asked who is “serious” about politics has told me a third party is either futile, or worse, counter-productive.

Well, being out of tune with the conventional wisdom doesn't faze me any more now than it did at the dawn of the PC era in the late 1970's and dawn of the internet era in the early 1990's. I have seen waves of fundamental change overtake and transform common knowledge time and time again, and I believe it can happen again.

I've become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

...I'll be speaking with Zack at MeshForum in a couple of weeks, and what I thought I'd say is very close to your “multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures.” We've been discussing at Greater Democracy how the parties (especially the Democrats) aren't responsive to the national conversation, in fact avoid the potential to build real communities and sponsor real discussions. Our politicians are doing all the talking and none of the listening. It strikes me as inevitable that a different kind of political force will evolve through social networks that are supported by communication networks (i.e. the Internet).

Business Week this week features a set of articles on Second Life, the avatar-based virtual community operated by Linden Lab. I started to say created by, but online communities are co-created by their members, the folks who make the platform are like any city's infrastructure – they serve the community, but it's inherently beyond their control. What's great about Linden Labs is that they totally understand that, and they're all about creativity in building an infrastructure that brings out the best in the community – perhaps I should say the various communities – that they serve. Business week notes that "it's not all fun and games," there are business applications for Second Life (and potentially for other graphically-realized virtual worlds that might follow).

Voters in Austin will be voting on an Open Government Amendment to the City Charter next month. Opponents to the amendment (Proposition 1 on the ballot) have created a campaign against its passage based on contentions about the amendment that are simply incorrect. Either they've misread the amendment, or they feel threatened by the idea of easier, broader citizen access to information about the city's operations and agreements. The latter would be troubling, to say the least. Interesting to see that Central Austin Democrats, West Austin Democrats, Capital Area Progressive Democrats, and University Democrats are supposedly all opposing the amendment - I tend to expect Democrats to support such things, and I suspect they've been taken in by the misleading interpretations circulated far and wide. If you're confuseed about the amendment and wonder what the fuss is about, it's helpful to read "Further thoughts on the new ballot language for Prop 1" posted by Scott Brown at OpenNetworks.org. Scott's done his homework, and he explains why the court-ordered rewrite of the ballot's language is still misleading.

We talk about getting focused on a task to get outside of ourselves. Scientists have a better sense of that process, as reported in New Scientist. The brain "switches off" self awareness when our concentration on something is intense. Wonder how this relates to a Buddhist, focused on breathing or on a koan?