I found a site with a bunch of post cards of "Old Big Spring." Flipping through I found a card I know well, two men on a diving board at "West Texas' Finest Pool." The guy in the back, sitting on the diving board, is my Dad. [Link]

I haven't read Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind; in fact, it's not even on the stack. However I was trippin' through the reviews at Amazon and noted John Hwung's assessment:

The title of the book is very appropriate. For the age that we are in, we need a whole new mind. However, the book promised a mansion, but ended up giving us an apartment. It begins like a Porsche, but ended like a VW Beetle. The author correctly diagnosed the disease of Abundance, Asia, and Automation, but prescribed the wrong medicine of six right-brain-directed (R-Directed) aptitudes.

Last we heard from Yuri Gitman, he was riding wireless "magic" bikes through NYC. I just stumbled onto one of his current projects,
"Beating Heart":

My Beating Blog is an attempt to take the journaling aspect of blogging into a surrealistic future, in which the blog author literally and metaphorically bares his heart. The artist-blogger wears a GPS-enabled Heart-rate monitor throughout parts of the day, then blogs the data along with matching personal experiences, events, and musings.

For three weeks, the site will blog a series of posts contextualizing heart-rate visualizations, GPS-maps, and personal journal entries. Online users are given a rare entrance into personal medical-grade statistics, stalker-level location tracking, and the private thoughts of the blogger. Inevitably, issues regarding privacy, exhibitionism, and voyeurism playfully emerge as the blogosphere is infused with biofeedback and location technology. Rather then play into a dystopian or Orwellian future, blogs and biofeedback are given a poetic license, reframing our awareness of our own and each others' beating hearts.

Mark's posting funny cellphone pix on Flickr: Set One | Set Two

While you're at it, check out Mark's boingboing pointer to Todd's 15 Minutes of Madness,

A group of 80 whale-watching tourists in Norway got an unwelcome dose of reality when they witnessed the a harpooning by whale hunters. Talk about conflicting realities – whale watchers vs whale hunters, and just as the protests against whaling in Norway were beginning to wan. [Link]

As if the shooting wasn't enough, the tourists were also treated to the sight of another whaling boat hauling one of their own dead whales up on deck.

"It was a fantastic sight to see a whale swimming and breeching," Dieleman said. "On the way back to Andenes, though, we saw a dead whale on deck. The blood was running, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

"I know that's part of life, but I don't think we expected to see anything like that."

Blue Origin's plan for its West Texas spaceport was revealed via its 200-page plus environmental assessment doc. "Blue Origin proposes to launch its reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet (99,060 meters) from a privately-owned space launch site in Culberson County, Texas." [Link]

The strategy is to build the New Shepard suborbital vehicle incrementally, starting with low-altitude tests, progressing to higher-altitude testing, and culminating with commercial flights. Early testing would use prototype vehicles that are smaller and/or less capable than the proposed final design.

Prototype craft would use the same or a subset of the same types of propellants as the operational New Shepard RLV in smaller quantities and would use the same ground facilities, infrastructure, and equipment.

Each new trial product would fly to higher altitudes and/or demonstrate additional subsystems than the previous prototype. Eventually, Blue Origin proposes to perform multiple flight tests of the actual operational New Shepard RLV system carrying Blue Origin personnel before commencing commercial operation.

Jimbo Wales has created a workspace with "the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites." [Link]

One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.

The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens.

I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.

Dana Blankenhorn does a great job explaining the real issue behind all the "net neutrality" wrangling. [Link]

There’s a cable silo. There’s a telephone silo. There’s a broadcast silo. There’s a wireless silo. There’s an Internet silo.

Each silo has its own rules. Most have their own taxes. Each has its own monopolists.

The time has come to break up the silos.

Bits are bits. Cable sends digital bits that are turned into TV pictures. Broadcasters are going digital to send HDTV. Telephony switched to bits long ago. Wireless bits are all around us, on both licensed and unlicensed frequencies.

So the time has come for the government, and the market, to treat bits as bits. Since everyone is selling bits, all they really need are incentives to sell more. And since there’s no shortage of bits, there is no longer an excuse for content regulation. Put the power to censor at the edge, alongside the power to explore.

My pal Hank Jones ( an Austin attorney and culturista who does a lot of public speaking himself) just sent me the link to Social Innovation Conversations at the Center for Social Innovation. The site has a mp3s of presentations at "Bridging the Gap: Leading Social Innovation Across Sectors," the Stanford 2005 Net Impact Conference. (The site also has a several podcast feeds.) Thanks, Hank!

Xeni Jardin reports that the whacky guys at Friendster filed a patent on the concept of the online social network, and posts a couple of comments about potential prior art, including a note from Sean Ness noting that Ryze preceded Friendster and that Jonathan Abrams explicitly said that he was taking the Ryze business networking concept to a site more focused in dating. I was a member of Ryze before Friendster launched; it's pretty clearly the same concept suggesting "prior art," so you have to marvel at Friendster's chutzpah in filing this patent. I talked to a patent attorney at a futurists' meeting a couple of weeks ago, and he said the patent office really does rsearch claims before they approve 'em. You gotta wonder about that. [Link]

Jon L. with pal Derek Woodgate of The Futures Lab

Polycot strategic partner The Futures Lab hosted last night's Austin Web Posse party, a terrific little jam with all the usual suspects. You may wonder why futurists are part of the web posse, but it makes perfect sense in context: The Futures Lab and my for-profit partnership Polycot have been talking quite a bit about the future of the web as part of our research to support strategic web consulting, and we're working on a presentation that explains Web 2.0 in the context of the web's evolution. Last night's party had a diverse crowd including many of the usual suspects from other projects Derek and I have been working on - Austin Future Salon, Culture Forum, etc.

Last week the European Parliament passed a resolution on onlie free expression, criticizing Internet companies that cooperate with repressive regimes. [Link]

The resolution calls on the European Commission to establish a "voluntary code of conduct" that places limits on the activities of companies in repressive countries and urges it to take account of the need for unhindered Internet access when considering its assistance programmes to third countries. The resolution is not, however, binding on the commission, which has exclusive responsibility for implementing EU policy in this area.

Yahoo !, Google and Microsoft are singled out for agreeing to censor themselves in China. Cisco Systems is accused of supplying Internet censorship technology. The European companies France Telecom and Telecom Italia are named because of their Internet area cooperation with Tunisia and Cuba.

Brian Aldiss, ostensibly inspired by an exhibition (The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe) about visions of the future, has a few visions of his own. Noting his profession as author of science fiction novels, he notes that they are "hardly a judicious study of discernable reality, but rather the realities discernable through a capricious temperament." Ah so. [Link]

Science over the past century in the west has brought many comforts and blessings including longer lifespans. Yet here that ominous phrase, "Research shows ..." beloved of journalists, enters; there are surveys that indicate how frequently men and women suffer as greatly as Wagner without having an ounce of his genius. There is reason to believe that the human brain has developed rather on an ad hoc basis - chance again - and is not without its imperfections. How else could warfare be so endemic? It is generally considered impolite to speak of self-styled homo sapiens in derogatory terms, but the question remains. Why are we not by now living in a utopia?

Archaeologists and palaeontologists provide us with a possible answer to the riddle. It is a cause for amazement that skulls of men are dug from the ground where they have lain intact for centuries, long after the softer materials associated with the skull have disintegrated. How much reckless evolutionary energy nature has expended on bone and the durability of bone. If only more of that energy had gone into building bigger and better-integrated brains.

In March I posted about the detention of filmmaker Hao Wu (or Wu Hao) in China, with a rather bleak update a couple of weeks later. Good news: he's been released. He still hasn't updated his blog, Beijing or Bust; word is that he "needs some silence for now." I'm not so sure he would've been released had it not been for support from Global Voices, the international aggregate blog. GV members spread the word.

Support was strong across the blogsphere, with hundreds of fellow bloggers posting on Nina and Hao’s story, as well as putting up Free Hao Wu tags. Support was there from some mainstream media, with the Wall Street Journal chipping in just a week ago, and a piece written in The Washington Post by Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon coinciding with Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to America:

“Hao turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party’s embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He got his MBA from

the University of Michigan and worked for EarthLink before returning to China to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker. He and his sister, Nina Wu, who works in finance and lives a comfortable

middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.”

Seven bombs exploded in an attack on rush-hour commuter trains in Mumbai. [CNN coverage] The MumbaiHelp blog, originally created during last year's floods, will be coordinating assistance.

Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett's taken the ultimate trip, dead at 60. [Link]

The madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
the winds they blew and the leaves did wag
they'll never put me in their bag
the seas will reach and always seep
so high you go, so low you creep
the wind it blows in tropical heat
the drones they throng on mossy seats
the squeaking door will always squeak
two up, two down we'll never-[lee] limit
so merrily trip forgo my side
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!

–Syd Barrett, Octopus

Some Web 2.0 article links, with excerpts and comments...

"Too many CIOs fail to ride Web 2.0 wave" by Shamus McGillicuddy at SearchSMB.com.

"If a vendor is telling them, 'Here is our Web 2.0 solution,' that's an illusion that needs to be dispelled," said Ray Valdes, research director of Internet platforms and Web services at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc., Valdes said. "Web 2.0 is not something you can buy and implement."

Some vendors are selling products labeled "Web 2.0" technology. But when it comes to Web 2.0, technology is just a means to an end. The real business value lies in what the technology enables: better collaboration among users. In fact, a growing number of companies are developing new business models to take advantage of the collaboration the technology empowers.

Valdes warns that while the products allows companies to build Web 2.0 applications, a company will also need to know how to use those apps to encourage the social interaction that is integral to the concept. It's "more than just the technology," Valdes said.

Regular readers of my blog know that I'm conflicted about the term Web 2.0 though I'm all about the participative, collaborative approaches that are inherent in Web 2.0 thinking. However there's a lot of confusion about the term, exacerbated by hype; the label could actually be useful if we had more writers lilke McGillicuddy, who get the reality behind the hype.

Consider that I recently saw a web development company's web site leading with the headline "What is Web 2.0?" There was no answer anywhere on the site; it was mostly about the company's adherence to web standards. They totally didn't seem to know what Web 2.0 was about, but they didn't mind using the term to sell services. Every time a company uses "Web 2.0" in a sales pitch, we get more confusion.

But I digress... more articles:

I've been waiting to see a clueful blogger run for office, and here he is (via Dana Blankenhorn): Pete Ashdown, who's running against Orrin Hatch in Utah. [Link] Ashdown's set up a MediaWiki-based Collaboration Wiki. He's actually asking for input on policy, which never happens (because, my pals who are political consultants tell me, you have to focus on MONEY, not POLICY, til you've won the election. I'm eager to see whether Ashdown will stay with the wiki and do something useful with the feedback.

Clueful Weblogsky favorite Feedburner has acquire blog analytics company Blogbeat. "The deal will allow the company to provide publishers with tools to better understand what headline feeds blog site visitors are reading." [Link]

Another tsunami struck Indonesia after a 7.7 quake. [Link to Reuters story] [Link to CNN story]

Just rec'd an update from Angelo Embuldeniya: 47 people dead and toll rising, Magnitude now at 7.7 (Revised by USGS). Island had no warning system. Pangandaran, a beach resort worst hit. Larger hotels remain standing but many of the smaller buildings along the coast were destroyed. 1 person dead and 19 missing at Puring Bay, 60 miles further east.

More updates being posted to http://blog.worldwidehelp.info

bOING bOING reports that the government of India is blocking access to blogs. [Link]

The plot gets thicker and thicker as more bloggers are getting alerted to the fact that an increasing number of Indian ISP's are banning blogspot and typepad blogs and geocities.com. Several detailed posts on this, with regular updates here: withinandwithout.com, Conversations with Dina, and Travel Tales from India.

There's a wiki here: Link. We're treading with a little caution before we go whole-hog at the government. There is a possibility that it is a mistake - where a directive from the government on a few blogs might have been misrepresented by ISP's here - who have blocked the entire sites.

Update from bOING bOING:

An Indian political blog is reporting that the ban was initiated by the Indian intelligence service to stop terrorism: Link. According to their source, the terrorists are using blogs to communicate. Not only is this useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies), it's akin to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

Dan Gillmor reports a very interesing collaborative new survey conducted byh Hsing Wei from Harvard Univiersity's Kennedy School ov Government. Good data about why people participate. [Link]

A desire to share knowledge and area of expertise was the top motivator, conveyed by 78.3%. A particular dimension of sharing revealed in the “Other” response option was exposing a larger narrative and set of opinions. Another primary motivation for writing and/or editing was to further action or attention on an important issue, 40.5%. A good number, 29.7% stated they were “professionals with first-hand knowledge that can enhance public information about current issues.” Only a small percentage, 7.9%, mentioned any interest in pursuing journalism.

Silona gave me a link to an article that summarizes the neuroscience behind leadership and change (requires registration). If you preach, you get resistance. It's better to "to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights," because "that's what the brain wants." [Link]

...some of the most successful management change practices have this type of principle ingrained in them. “Open-book management,” for example, has been credited with remarkable gains at companies like Springfield Remanufacturing, because it repeatedly focuses employees’ attention on the company’s financial data. Toyota’s production system, similarly, involves people at every level of the company in developing a fine-grained awareness of their processes and how to improve them. In both of these approaches, in workplace sessions that occur weekly or even daily, people systematically talk about the means for making things better, training their brains to make new connections. If you took an fMRI scan of a Springfield or Toyota employee when that person joined the company and again after 10 years on the job, the two scans might reveal very different patterns.

Check out George and the Four Condis performing "Addicted to Oil" (might as well pump it!) Thanks, Gillo [Link]

Alan's report on the Tällberg Conference is sort of disturbing for its sense that we might have to resign ourselves to our inability to do serious, effective, and proactive work required to ensure the survival of the fancy monkeys. The Tällberg Conference may be as good as it gets, and not good enough. [Link]

I confess that on Day 1, I had hopes that Tällberg Forum would "do something." Or perhaps "be something." A turning point. A new start. A breakthrough. A time of serious new commitment to change. I know that is unrealistic, but I have embraced the Buckminster Fuller dictum, "Dare to be naive." It is the only way such things can be made the least bit possible. It is the only way to avoid the far worse trap of cynicism. There was significantly less cynicism than usual on display at Tällberg, which is perhaps one of the greatest compliments one can give to an international conference on the problems of our time. It seemed quite a number of people, including some relatively powerful people (when in their public roles), were also daring to be at least a little naive.

But by Day 3, I had made my peace with the fact that the Tällberg Forum was what it was: a good conference, with a particularly interesting assemblage of people, in a particularly nice place. The musicians, led by multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller and serving up a pot pourri of world music, were superb and inspiring. The Tällberg organization itself was also "tight", just as one says of a good band. They struggled with timing, but they kept the whole thing moving forward, broke it up with artistic interludes, created an atmosphere that created, in turn, a good place to talk.

And the talk? Well, as one of my colleagues reminded me, "This is as good as it gets." He explained that he had attended quite a number of "high end" conferences recently, including Davos and others, and that one just should not have very high expectations about the world's capacity for serious, searching dialogue about global direction. Tällberg was, for him, an indicator of how well the world was thinking about big issues, in a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural way, because it represented a kind of peak in how such dialogues occur. This was a sobering reflection.

But perhaps the trend is in the right direction. To my mind, the world is not anywhere near as "serious" as it needs to get about the complex problems we face in this century. But the Tällberg motto, "Getting Serious", implies that this is a process. We will need to keep working, as a world, on "Getting Serious" for a long time to come.

One of my most memorable teachers was the great Red Gibson, who did the lecture piece of my copy editing class at the University of Texas around 1971. Gibson taught a pragmatic economy of style that was critical discipline given my tendency, at the time, to capture undisciplined prose explosions on the page, thinking I had created poetry. Gibson taught me to appreciate discipline and structure in writing, and to pare down, then pare down again. The book he referred to as Strunk and White was required reading for the course... its full name, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, a little book (around 100 pages in its current edition) used originally as a textbook for Strunk's class, before White revised and annotated it years later for publication as a textbook.

The last place I expected to find a reference to "the little book" was Boxes and Arrows, which (if you don't know it already) is a popular reference site for web designers. However site founder Christina Wodtke has written a terrific essayabout the impact of Elements of Style on designers, explaining why it's "the most commonly cited book" in "web design screeds." Wodtke is an excellent writer herself, and she extends parts of the little book very effectively into advice for web designers:

This is an easy translation into the design space—although you may have an impressive design style, make sure that your design is tempered to the needs of the project. A commerce site should probably not evoke gasps of pleasure at its beauty, but rather a sense of security, trust, a wealth of choice and appropriate prices.

You have a style and a way of working that is natural to you; to take on an unnatural style will result in a flawed product. Conversely your style is not necessarily suited to every project. Too often, because we are praised for our natural talent, we think that is all there is to design. But there is craft, there is understanding the product’s brand, and there is understanding not only conventions of the web, but conventions of the domain. Somehow one must balance our design nature with the environment of work.

Tim O'Reilly has identified "four big ideas" about Open Source. He'll present these at OSCON, but he's posted a preview. I'll summarize here:

1. The architecture of participation beyond software. What we're calling Web 2.0 draws on the self-organizing principles behind the open source movement, but moves beyond that into the architecture of participation, which involves the user in the development process.
2. Asymmetric competition. Open Source can "compete in a way that undercuts all of the advantages of incumbent players," but companies forming around Open Source don't grasp the implications of the new model. Asymmetric competition means that you compete on resouorces, processes, and values that are different from the competiton's, building critical mass with a more or less different market. Think Linux vs Windows. If open source companies compete symmetrically with other companies, they sink into the same stew of VC-financed build-and-sell bigco wrangling, while bootstrap companies who see a new model for doing business and go with it will build the next round of real innovation.
3. How Software As a Service Changes The Points of Business Leverage. Tim says it best: "Operations and scalability lead to powerful cost advantages; increasing returns from network effects lead to new kinds of lock-in. The net effect is that even when running open source software, vendors will have lock-in opportunities just as powerful as those from the previous generation of proprietary software."
4. Open Data. If we value open systems (such as free and open source software), we should remember that data driven systems as we have with Web 2.0 aren't open if the data's locked down.
Tim goes on to say "the pendulum always swings between open and proprietary, and despite the apparent progress of open source and open standards, right now the pendulum is swinging the other way," and note the real challenges for open source strategists.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a report, Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers, baed on a national phone survey of bloggers. [Link] Some of the findings:

• The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.
• Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.
• Bloggers often use blog features that enhance community and usability.
• For most, blogging is a hobby, not an activity that consumes their lives.
• Seven in ten bloggers post when inspiration strikes, not on a set schedule.
• LiveJournal tops the list of blogging sites in this survey.
• Most bloggers post material for themselves, but one-third blog mostly to engage their audience.
• Few offer an RSS feed, possibly because many bloggers are not aware of the technology.(!)

Weblogsky pal Joel Greenberg, podcaster extraordinaire, talked to several folks at the July 13 Dorkbot Austin, including Polycot's own Maida Barbour, who's been working with O'Reilly on a Southwest Maker's Faire. [Link] Larry Archer also captured the scene on his blog.

A couple of days ago I mentioned a report that the government of India was blocking access to blogspot, typepad, and geocities blogs. Here's an explanation from A.R. Ghanashyam, Deputy Consul General based in NYC, forwarded to Global Voices by Saja:

A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sens itivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well known search engines. The matter was immediately taken note of by our CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) was informed of it. The DOT took up the matter forthwith with the search engines and instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two impertinent pages. Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.

Department of Telecommunications have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.

Jasmina blogs a visit to Holly Beach, Louisiana. "We enter the tourist center at the border of Louisiana. We want to go to Holly Beach, we say. Holly Beach isn't there any more, says the clerk, politely smiling." Indeed, Holly Beach quit the scene, wiped bare by Hurricane Rita. [Link]

The graveyards have no fences left, the churches have no windows. These people here are all Catholics, and the state of Louisiana is divided into parishes, not civil counties.

I have seen dead towns before, destroyed by war, not nature. My friend argues. The oil of Louisiana is pumped and produced all over these desolate marshlands as if nothing else matters; fossil fuel is like heroin, selling like crazy since the price is soaring worldwide, and bringing the damage of climate change back to the marshland. The refineries smell of pollution, putrid fish, putrid capitalism.

I am interested in people, not things. But there are not many people around here any more.

Ana Marie Cox notes that, while the architects of the Iraq War and their boosters argue that media portrays the war as a downer whereas soldiers on the ground could tell you all the good things that are happening, you can see that's not the case by surfing through the videos they're sharing on sites like YouTube. [Link]

By that logic, putting cameras in the hands of those soldiers on the ground should provide enough celebration for an "Up with Iraq" musical.

There's music in a lot of the soldiers' videos, but precious little uplift. In "The War Tapes," one soldier/auteur complains frequently about the risks he and his comrades take to protect the property of the Halliburton subsidiary subcontracted to feed the troops: "Why the f--- am I sitting out here guarding a truck full of cheesecake?" he laments. After another guardsman supplies a Bush Administration-approved justification for their presence (freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, stability in the Middle East), the cameraman asks, "tell me how you really feel." Deadpan, he continues: "After that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."

Guy Kawasaki has a great, appropriately cynical post about Chris Anderson's "long tail" where he appreciates the book and the thinking behind it, then reminds us that a long tail company is tactically difficult to pull off, via a "cynic’s checklist for the implementation of long-tail ideas." [Link]

As I reported a couple of days ago, India's no longer blocking most blogs, but they're still blocking the sites originally specified. Ethan Zuckerman says

That India is blocking any sites is disappointing. I’d like to see all governments - my own included - block only as an absolute last resort, and as a way to prevent access to content that’s clearly illegal, like child pornography. And I think it’s critical that governments who do block the Internet do so in a way that’s transparent, posting a page that makes it clear that a site has been blocked, offering an appeals process and makng it clear that the page isn’t inaccessible due to technical errors. (Oddly enough, the Saudi practice for blocking prohibited content is near ideal on these criteria, and vastly better than blocking blindly, as Indian ISPs did.) As Neha and Atanu pointed out in the quotes I blogged yesterday, blocking blogs is a slippery slope. Blocking opaquely makes it even more slippery.

The sailor's back in town.

Against the Day might be the title of Thomas Pynchon's new novel. We'll find out soon enough. [Link]

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

This llittle manifesto is pretty good... nail it to your door and read it. I was surprised the author thought "geek activism" was something new... I was moved to post the following....

Your initial premise ("Geek activism has not taken off yet") is incorrect, I think. There was plenty of geek.activism in the 90s: EFF, of course, but also EPIC and CDT, CPSR and NetAction, GILC, the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, 2600, Wired Mag's activist days, netizen, Jon Katz' Geek Force, my own Electronic Frontiers Forum at HotWired, etc. That said, there's good stuff in your theses... I might disagree with a few. For instance, there's no guarantee that we'll still have a public domain in the future... legislators have talked seriously about permanent copyright. Proprietary data formats can store public information as long as the information remains public and is stored in other formats that aren't proprietary (but I know what you meant). I'm not sure that spimes are a sign that things are going well... spimes have a sinister side (read Everyware).

A couple of suggestions. One is to read Extreme Democracy (http://extremedemocracy.com), a book that Mitch Ratcliffe and I edited. This may be seen as a shameless plug, but it's a pretty good anthology of geek activist writings.

The other suggestion is to consider going to the League of Technical Voters programmer lock-in October 13-15 (http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/drupal/). That's a good way to be both geek and activist.

I left a few things out of that historical rant: FringeWare, Cypherpunks, Fight Censorship, and, of course, EFF-Austin.

Like many of us who have 'way too much going on, Hiroshi Ishiguro wished he could be in two places at once. Unlike most of us, he's pulled it off by building a Hiroshi-bot, a robot that mimics his appearance and movement. [Link]

Ishiguro said he wants the robot to have sonzai-kan, or presence. His group will try to quantify the elusive quality that makes people sit up and take notice, and figure out how it can be captured and transmitted.

"I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid," says Ishiguro, who seems perfectly at ease with his new twin.

Via Joi's blog: Linda Stone has created a wiki on continuous partial attention, which is what I've been calling multitasking. The definition on the wiki clarifies that continuous partial attention is different... [Link]

When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task -- we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch -- we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

The peer-reviewed web journal First Monday has a paper on "Open source disaster recovery" that discusses the Katrina Peoplefinder project. As one of the participants in that project, I noted some differences in the article and my perception of the project. I sent a few notes to one of the authors... repreated here for the record. Italic items are quotes from the paper.

"Ethan Zuckerman led the technical effort of assigning chunks of unstructured data to volunteers and on Saturday, 3 September, a wiki was set up for this purpose at katrinahelp.info."

The actual sequence of events:

• Geilhufe posted a call to action.
• Ethan and I were the first two volunteers. We agreed to work on data scraping and data entry.
Ethan worked with others on scripts to scrape data for data entry.
• I worked with data entry volunteers and became the tech support guy for the effort.
• katrinahelp.info already existed, so we asked if we could use it as our base of operations.
• Ethan worked through the weekend, then had to leave. Zack Rosen took over for him.

Project leaders were hesitant to form a relationship with the Red Cross, whose database was built with assistance from Microsoft. Jon Lebkowsky writes in the Smart Mobs blog, “Marty Kearns of Network Centric Advocacy encouraged the PeopleFinder project to throw its data to Red Cross and to push for the Red Cross site to be the single authoritative search for evacuees and other Katrina victims, and family and friends searching for them. Marty’s suggestion implied a difficult question: should the PeopleFinder project end?” (Lebkowsky, 2005).

- We weren't really hesitant to work with Red Cross, in fact, I was actively pushing for it, and we all understood the importance of that relationship. The real question was how to get their attention, and whether they would take over. That was resolved by simply making the PFIF data availble to them (and to Yahoo and Google),

One key figure — David Geilhufe — oversaw the PeopleFinder project and negotiated relationships with other organizations.

- Initially, yes, but leadership became fractal pretty quickly. David couldn't be expected to stay on top of it all. Ultimately multiple leaders emerged, and were more or less effective. I recall one conference call where a whole new set of people were trying to assume leadership with no sense of the history and direction of the project. (Those who had been working on the project evidently didn't have time to make the call.)

Also note that ShelterFinder, a significant project and arguably more successful in meeting its goals than PeopleFinder, emerged from within the PeopleFinder volunteer base with a different set of leaders and processes.

Each of the organizers highlights his or her role within the project, sometimes to the exclusion of other key figures.

The issue of receiving credit for work carried out also applies to PeopleFinder's tense alliance with the Red Cross, when volunteers worried that the project would come to an end as a result. Yet the alliance was made despite these worries because working with a better known organization would increase the project’s effectiveness, giving victims access to a central, well–known place to go for information and assistance.

Again, I think this conclusion is based on an overstatement of the tension that I myself reported. And it was less that the project would end than that the work would stop before finished, and that some of the work wouldn't be used.

A final word: I haven't seen any evidence that our data helped anyone find someone who was missing, and design decisions early in the process made the data less useful, in my opinion. For instance, those entering data couldn't make changes, so if they made an error, they had to re-enter the data (so we had many duplications). The assumption was that it was better to work fast and have duplications than to slow down to correct errors.

My biggest concern was that there was no way to reconcile 'missing' reports with 'found' reports. You couldn't update records, period.

News from Ross Mayfield of SocialText: today saw the release of Socialtext Open, the first commercial open source wiki. Ross says this is the final step in the company's transformation into a commercial Open Source business. The Open wiki's downloadable from SourceForge.

Xeni posted a link to an AP article on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Spaceport near Van Horn, Texas. In Digital Convergence Initiative meetings, I keep saying that we should consider space among the convergent Texas industries — and that's a part of Texas that could use a little industry. [Link]

The National Poetry Slam's coming to Austin in a couple of weeks, August 9-12, happening at several venues. The preliminary slams are free, but you have to buy a ticket for the semifinals and finals.

Here's an excerpt from a longer press release:

The National Poetry Slam has grown from a bardic grudge match between Chicago and San Francisco to a four-day festival involving hundreds of poets, as many as a dozen venues, and audiences numbering in the thousands. Organizers for the 2006 National Poetry Slam, to be held in Austin, Texas., this coming August, expect record numbers of teams and audience members to converge on Austin for the largest poetry event of its kind.

The 2006 National Poetry Slam, which will kick off on Wednesday, August 9 with as many as 80 teams competing in eight venues along Congress Avenue, will culminate with the Individual Finals show on Friday, August 11 at the historic Paramount Theater and the Team Finals competition on Saturday, August 12 at the newly-revitalized Palmer Auditorium.

"When we held Nationals in Austin in 1998, it was the largest one in history," said co-director Mike Henry. "Selling out the Paramount Theater for poetry was an unthinkable accomplishment at the time, and now it's part of slam's considerable lore. In 2006, Austin is ready to add another chapter to the story and make history again."

The National Poetry Slam is the premier annual event for poetry slammers across the globe. Billed as "the competitive art of performance poetry," slam was invented in Chicago in July 1986 by Marc Smith, a construction worker-turned-poet who included the slam as part of his performance poetry troupe's weekly show at the Green Mill Tavern, an uptown Chicago watering hole once frequented by Al Capone.

Very cool little Ajax widget: you can add mini-profiles of politicians to your pages. [Link] (Thanks to Greg Elin for the pointer!)

Here's an example, my own rep. This probably won't work if you're reading this in an RSS feed or email. Otherwise, Just mouse over the sunny widget on the right of Smith's surname.

Representative Lamar Seeligson SMITH

Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth, the most active of telecom activists, asks this question in an informative piece at the Nieman Watchdog. Don't just read it, Digg it.

These bill names use D.C.-Speak, a modern Orwellian vernacular. Both would give the Bells new incentives in the form of national franchises with no "build-out" requirements for states or cities to be fully wired. The cable companies currently have local franchises, where the companies have to meet specific requirements for local provisioning, such as local access channels. This new corporate “one size fits all” national franchise is not about customers but about expediency and lack of community services, as the House bill allows the new entrants (that is, the phone companies) not to worry about local, existing obligations. The House bill adds an additional 1 percent tax on the cable operators' gross revenues, and the language of the bill states that the operators can “designate that portion of a subscriber's bill attributable to such payment”, meaning that new taxes can be charged directly to the customer.

The phone companies have had extensive financial incentives before, but they have never fulfilled their obligations. Rewarding them for such a record is brazen, and raises the question of whether Capitol Hill lawmakers are in cahoots with the telecoms.

It's hot, and it's gonna get hotter. Instead of debating cause and nature, we should be planning for scorched earth scenarios. The world's not ready for environmental upheaval.

Relevant note: the argument that current climate change is some kind of natural cycle and not a result of the massive spew of industrial and automotive exhausts, even if valid, doesn't mean it's okay to keep spewing.

Following my various email experiments and complaints, I've settled into a Gmail habit. Google engineered a couple of changes that made Gmail more usable. Now you can retain formatting when you paste rich text into a message you're composing, and you have an option to archive all messages in your inbox, and delete all message identified as spam. (Before you had to page through and select a pagefull of messages at a time).

I still find that I miss some n ew messages because of the way conversations are grouped, but that's probably more a learning curve issue than a problem with the technology.

Storing email on somebody's remote system isn't ideal, but my email load is so heavy that the overhead for downloading and managing messages is just too much, especially with the added processing that spam control requires. When I'm using Gmail, overall local system performance improves dramatically, especially compared to performance when Outlook is running, which is actually Outlook + Qurb + Kaspersky Antivirus.

Gmail does occasionally hiccup. It was offline for a while yesterday afternoon, for instance, and that worried me a bit. (The system says "Oops!" - not really what you want to hear from your mail system or your surgeon.)

After five years working on various projects via Polycot Consulting, a partnership I cofounded, I've decided it's time for a change. I think we built a great company, and Polycot will rock on, but I'm going in a different direction from the company. Specifically, I want to devote more of my time to work with nonprofits and advocacy organizations, writing and blogging, future-focused research and thinking, and independent consulting. I expect to blog more at my own site and work more with my WorldChanging colleagues, and I'm forming a web-focused nonprofit with Silona Bonewald called AssistOrg.

I was tempted to follow Jason Kottke's lead and seek patronage so I could focus more on writing. Jason sez "for fun and income, I build web sites and edit kottke.org" – and there's another idea; I could build web sites, something I really enjoy doing, the way some people like to build models or carve wood. If you're a regular reader and want to feed the blogger, there's a "Support Weblogsky" link in the right nav at weblogsky.com, as an experiment.

Onward!

Dave Pentecost, back from Mexico and Guatemala, send a link to the brief intro to the documentary he's been shooting. Looking forward to the complete film!

Media Matters metacovers CNN's recent rapturous moments, dancing the apocalypso with a couple of of Christian authors, Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg, who says

I've been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, Israelis, Arab leaders all want to understand the Middle East through the lens of biblical prophecies. I'm writing these novels that keep seeming to come true. But we're seeing Bible prophecy, bit by bit, unfold in the Middle East right now....I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It's actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that's why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim's books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events....They're New York Times best-sellers, because they're based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.

Maybe the rapture's already happened, but only a couple of guys qualified, and they were both living in caves, so nobody noticed they'd gone?

FringeWare used to carry a Macintosh-based game called Rupture the Rapture by Robert Carr. As I recall, the idea was to blast souls out of the sky as they ascended. Searching a reference, I found a blog by that name, and found an interesting name Rapture-bound fundamentalists – "Raptiles."

The Raptiles are giddy with glee. They are jumping up and down with joy in there belief that the present hostilities between Israel and Lebanon are the first salvos of the coming final battle at Armageddon between the armies of jesus and the anti-christ and his minions. The odds-on favorite for the anti-christ is, of course, Osama, or perhaps a mullah yet to be named (along with a 2nd round draft choice in 2009 should 2009 actually happen.) Some are sticking with Bill Clinton. My money's on Rob Schneider.

Austin Media Justice, a coalition of community media, technology, and social justice groups, met today to share discuss aspects of housing (and the lack of it) in Austin -- according to the announcement, "everything from affordability, sustainability, accessibility, and land use to historical preservation and gentrification." The idea was to focus on this specific issue and consider how the group can leverage community media and technology to mitigate the lack of affordable, sustainable housing. The first speaker, DeAnne Cuellar of San Antonio's Texas Media Empowerment Project, explained how the organization has worked with citizens to collect data on bias and misrepresentation in local media through their media monitoring project. They've also helped find alternatives to public access programming, which went away when the latest Texas telecommunications bill was passed, taking franchising to the state level and freeing cable companies from an obligation to negotiate local franchises. Communities like San Antonio negotiated public access programming in franchise agreements. Time Warner shut down SA's public access channel as quickly as it could, though it later provided a replacement channel, but that channel is only accessible to subscribers who pay for digital service.

The second speaker Susanna Almanza of PODER (People in Defeinse of Earth and her Resources), gave organization's history as an environmental justice group that helped shut down Austin's infamous tank farm and relocate the Austin recycling center, among others. Now the organization is focusing on gentrification of East Austin, where propoerty values have quadrupled, and as a result taxes have increased beyond any possibility of payment for many residents. One proposed solution to the housing problem: $55 million in affordable housing bonds, one of several bond propositions voters will decide in November. A first project of the media justice coalition: support the bond program, in part by noting in bias or misrepresentation in reporting prior to the election. My own proposal was for the group to put together a site for local media analysis and criticism, similar to Media Matters (which has incidentally, launched a regional sitefor Colorado). We discussed setting something like that up as part of a larger initiative that would include expansion of media monitoriong into Austin and other parts of Texas, and education on critical evaluation of media.

The Cassini spacecraft has discovered what appears to be hydrocarbon lakes on Saturns moon Titan. [Link]

Stewart Brand reviews Vernor Vinge's latest, Rainbows End, in which

everybody's real world is draped with arrays of private and shared virtual realities, and "Search and Analysis" is the core skill taught to the young and the rejuvenated old as "the heart of the economy." It turns out that the crux of a Search and Analysis world (and of Vinge's narrative) is this: who knows what, and how, and how is their knowing displayed or cloaked?

Brand notes that Vinge has influenced the thinking behind Internet development in the past, and in this book proposes concepts that might catch on, as well, like "'Secure Hardware Environment' as the deeply reliable and unhackable foundation of everything online and virtual" and "'certificate authorities' that offer people
the option of accountability amid the blizzard of faux personalities lashing through cyberspace." That last reference brings to mind the Internet Identity workshops. [Link to Brand's review]

I've been using Technorati since early on; now it's three years old and has just completed a major upgrade that makes it, for bloggers and blog readers, one of the most useful sites on the web. Originally a search engine focused on blog content and traffic analysis, Technorati has added and improved features... here's Dave Sifry's summary from his post about the upgrade:

• Technorati is 3 years old! What an amazing trip so far.
• The World Live Web is all about people - We're here to help make sense of all the interesting stuff we do in real-time.
• Technorati's rolled out a major update to our site and to our back-end systems.
• We've made some major speed and accuracy improvements in core search.
• Link counting is a lot more accurate and timely.
• We've personalized the homepage so you can get a look at all the stuff you care about on one page.
• While we love expert bloggers, we've also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.
• We've added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.
• We've made some big changes to blog profiles - allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking.
• We've made things easier for advertisers and partners, and we've been overwhelmed with demand. We're building out our capabilities, and if you're interested in advertising, drop us a line.
• This is just a start - there's more to come in the coming weeks and months, including better charts, more real-time spam detection and elimination, more real-time media indexing, microformats integration, and additional localization and language support.

Technorati hasn't always worked perfectly, but that's the 21st century for you – we're living a perpetual beta existence. The good news is that it keeps getting better.

Alex Dragulescu has created "spam architecture" images based on patterns and rhythms found in junk email text. [Link]