Author, consultant, and acknowledged thought leader focused on social media and the Internet, technology and technoculture, sustainability and "bright green" environmental action.
Has George W. Bush committed a crime by spying without a warrant? I'm increasingly convinced that, once he's left office and we're under new management, Bush will face years of legal grief, and a Rutland Herald editorial suggests he might be thinking the same thing, and that the days of woe might be pretty close:
But with Democrats in control of Congress, it may have dawned on the Bush White House that someone may notice that violation of FISA is a felony. Bamford noted that one of the charges in the articles of impeachment drawn up against President Nixon was "illegal wiretaps." Maybe Bush's legal protectors have grown fearful that someone will conclude that a felonious offense is also an impeachable offense.
A federal judge in Michigan has already ruled that the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program was illegal, and the case is now under appeal. Because Bush has agreed now to comply with FISA, Gonzalez is arguing that the case is moot. But as Bamford noted, a bank robber cannot escape responsibility for breaking the law by saying he will not do it again.
Bram Cohen has a few amusing words for Mark Cuban, who seems to be yearning for a media environment more like the 20th century's. It's no wonder he called his company "Broadcast.com." [Link]I
'm not sure what his point is. Despite BitTorrent having 135 million installs and being 55% of all internet traffic, P2P in general 'is a product that tests great. In application however, it has a ton of challenges'. Maybe he's talking trash because he invested $1.7 million in a 'BitTorrent-like' company. He's been transparent about such motivations before. That said, he does has some claim to punditry in the bandwidth space because his $5 billion sale of broadcast.com for yahoo stock set the precedent for valuing bandwidth supply companies based on how quickly they flush money down the toilet. (Amusingly, if you go to broadcast.com today it simply redirects to yahoo.com.)
RU Sirius has put together an online course on Timothy Leary and his work, called "Timothy Leary: Personas, Media, and Messages." The course is six weeks beginning February 26, at a cost of $120... offered through the M a y b e L o g i c A c a d e m y.
One aspect of the course will deal with Timothy Leary’s personal and intellectual history. We will look at how he changed culture. We will look at the controversies around his life and person. And we will understand transhumanism and Leary’s role as one of the first transhumanists .
The other aspect of the course will incorporate exercises suggested by Leary himself in exploring his evolutionary circuits in his book, The Game Of Life.
Bruce Schneier notes that we can defeat the terrorists by refusing to be terrorized. [Link]
Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
Last night I joined members of the Online Facilitation email list for a tour of Second Life, including a balloon ride over various places created by Linden Lab employees. I'm finding the Second Life experiences pretty interesting, though someone on the list questioned, after the fact, just what it's good for. Here's part of my response:
...if you looked at events in search, you'd see that there's loads of stuff going on. After we finished last night, I dropped by a location where there was going to be a 'Socrates Cafe' - philosophical discussion - and talked to the person who was setting up for it. They get a good turnout, and I could see how the visuals were kind of an ambient enhancement... discussion is harder when you're moving around and trying to do stuff, which is one use of the system, but it's easier when you're sitting in a supportive context, focusing on verbal communication while influenced or "vibed" by the visual environment. I also found a Buddhist center with meditation cushions, where there are regular discussions of Buddhist practice and philosophy.
Joel Greenberg of GSD&M was showing a bunch of us around SL the other night. GSD&M is a high-end ad agency based here in Austin. They've bought an island, which they call Idea City, which is a concept from one of the company's founders (their building here also has that name). I think they use it for sessions where they can prototype ad campaigns. They also give back to the SL community - they have a place where you can get a parachute and be shot from a cannon straight up, skydiving down.
Photo: Nancy's avatar on the balloon, floating and looking around.
Yesterday Marsha and I went to a steel drum concert by members of the Inside Out Steel Pan project led by C.J. Menge, playing with steel bands from various Austin schools. Menge is artist in residence working with the steel bands for Bowie and McCallum High Schools as well as Covington Middle School. They perform occasionally, one venue being Austin Lyric Opera'sArmstrong Community Music School, which is where they were playing yesterday, which was also Carnaval in Austin. At the end of the steel drum concert, Acadêmicos da Ópera showed up for an impromptu performance. I think they were warming up for their performance at Carnaval last night. We were blown away by the great high-energy romp and the kinetic energy of Acadêmicos leader Robert Patterson, which I captured in a bit of video posted below. Unfortunately there's no sound, but several sound snippets are
downloadable from the Acadêmicos site.
I recently met Robert Stikmanz in a nonliterary context, and he mentioned the imminent release of his novel Prelude to a Change of Mind: The First Book in the Lands of Nod, which he said is one part of a larger body of work. A week or two ago, I got an email announcing yesterday's reading and signing at Book People, which drew a huge crowd and piqued my interest... this seems like a book that everybody should read though one read is probably going to create some kind of habit, sucked into the world of the Dvarsh... (Stikmanz, aka Rob Lewis, has been evolving a mythopoetic universe in his head for a couple of decades.)
Extropy Institute has set up a legal support fund for Keith Henson, who's been tracked down and arrested after several years as a fugitive. His story's unbelievable – and shocking, because it's true. His crime: joking about Scientology. [Link]
On Friday, Arizona police arrested a 64-year-old man — a fugitive since 2001 in a bizarre war that mixes free speech, copyright law, and the Church of Scientology.
Keith Henson’s journey began seven years ago while innocuously watching another critic mock the group on an internet newsgroup. In a gonzo discussion about procuring a “Tom Cruise missile,” they’d joked about working with “Secret Agent 99, wearing a stunning black leather biker outfit.” Other posters joined in the internet discussion, asking whether Tom Cruise missiles are affected by wind.”No way,” Keith joked. “Modern weapons are accurate to a matter of a few tens of yards.”
The police were informed of his “threatening” posts, and Henson was arrested.
Amazing photo by Antti Kemppainen, actually a composite of three photos shot at a beach in Perth, Australia: Australia Day fireworks on the left, Comet McNaught in the center, and a thunderstorm with intense lightning on the right.
Followup to my post about Samba Drums: here's a video clip from Carnaval Brasileiro, this one with sound (and dancers!) Also note - the drummers and the Inside Out Steel Band will be performing at Ruta Maya on February 17 (World Carnival). Also worth noting: the Acadêmicos da Ópera has a Myspace page.
Faced with declining revenues as calls become cheaper, network operators are determined to secure a large slice of the lucrative search advertising market.
AT&T's strategy was going to be to charge the Googles of the world more money "quality of service," an idea that stirred up the net neutrality debate. It shouldn't be too surprising that they want to grab a piece of the $illions poured into advertising over their infrastructure... however it's not enough to build the search, they have to make it more attractive than Google, Yahoo, et al.
The networks may decide to go with an existing search engine and use their combined might to secure a majority slice of the income. Another idea up for discussion is the creation of a white label service, with a single advertising sales house and technical team, to which mobile networks could then apply their own brand.
A UK executive at one of the companies involved said: "There is a big play in mobile search that we need to be part of, and we are exploring those options at a very high level."
...while we're heartened by the media's generally good reporting on the severity and unanimity of the IPCC's conclusions, we're a bit disappointed that more reporters haven't picked up on the fact that the IPCC's conclusions are baselines, conservative findings they were sure they could scientifically defend (and in some cases, even less bold than that) and (as Gil wrote yesterday), many serious scientists believe that the most accurate climate models suggest we can expect to see much more dramatic effects, much more quickly, particularly as regards how quickly the seas will rise. Worse, there has been little acknowledgment that some of the major wildcards, like the possible release of massive amounts of methane from melting permafrost, or a huge change in the climate functions of the ocean due to acidification leads to (as Andy Revkin puts it) "a more than a 1-in-10 chance of much greater warming, a risk that many experts say is far too high to ignore."
Alex likes to think of climate change as a challenge ("we have an opportunity for adventure and possibility now") and I try to go there, too, and feel some relief that the reality is finally sinking in. A next step here in Texas might be to Stop the Coal Rush, i.e. let our legislators (many of whom were brewed in the same pot as Bush) know that we're serious about climate change. ("The purpose of this event is to ask Texas State Legislators to intervene on the unfair permitting process and stop the permits for 18 dirty coal-fired power plants proposed in Texas. We want clean and safe energy solutions for Texas!")
"Architectures of Control" ponders our tendency to eat all of a portion we're fed, so that if we get "supersized" portions, we eat more. My wife and I have noticed, with our kids out of the house, that we eat all or most of a dish that used to serve the whole fmaily with leftovers for another meal.
One question which does arise from thinking about packaging and portion sizes is to what extent established sizes (weights, volumes) have affected consumers’ habits. Is it coincidence that, say, a typical bag of crisps (potato chips) in the UK used to be 1 oz (around 28g), and that that’s about the portion that most people ate in one go? In the last ten years though, cheaper brands have reduced to 25g or less, and premium brands escalated up to 38g or 45g - and yet still people eat one packet at a time, even when it may be almost double the weight of another. When the default size of spirit measures in pubs has gradually risen from 25 ml (down from 1 fl oz previously?) up to 35 ml or even doubles (50 ml) unless the customer specifies otherwise, this must have an effect on consumers’ behaviour. Most people do not spend double the time drinking a 50 ml measure that they do a 25 ml measure. They drink it in perhaps a few seconds longer, yet have imbibed double the amount of alcohol. (Equally, the shape of glasses affects perceptions of liquid quantity - more of Prof Wansink’s research.)
Hence, this choice of default can have a major effect on behaviour, and is surely a powerful control technique in itself...
Some interesting bits about the NY Times in a rare interview with its publisher:
There may be no paper version of the Times five years from now
Print and online news desks at the Times have merged.
"We have ... five people working in a special development unit whose only job is to initiate and develop things related to the electronic world - Internet, cellular, whatever comes."
"We are curators, curators of news. People don't click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust."
I have the same relationship with email that Fibber McGee had with the contents of his closet; I've posted several rants about my email woes, and here's another: after several months using Gmail as my primary mail client, I've gone back to Outlook again. At least Outlook is performing better than before, probably because I spent the many hours scrubbing and defragmenting while trying to correct a Firefox performance problem.
I'm still getting most of my mail at gmail, either directly or by forwarding other accounts, but I'm using Outlook to retrieve it via Gmail's pop3 system. I'm doing this because Gmail's system was just too chaotic; I was missing messages right and left. If you get a couple hundred emails a day, Gmail is probably fine, but when you get thousands, it's very hard to keep track. This is because gmail uses labels rather than filters, so you can't drop messages categorically into various mailboxes so that it's out of the way until you need it... so you can miss messages in the deluge. Worse, gmail combines all messages on a single subject, with no option to view the messages separately. This made it much harder for me to see responses to messages I'd sent or conversations I'd joined.
I should say I'm using BOTH Outlook and Gmail. Gmail is too valuable for search to abandon completely, even though its architecture defeats a power user's attempts to organize. It's also handy if you move around a lot, and sometimes prefer a web-based client.
I suspect many other folks are set up this way, and that's fine for Google - they only want the data.
Photo: Fibber McGee, buried under the contents of his closet.
Simplicity is complicated. And, as Bryan Trogdon posts in comments, quoting Leonardo, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." [Link]
While we may set out to design a “simple” system, it is shortsighted to force it when it may not be appropriate for the end-users or the tasks. Applying user research methods to guide design decisions will assist in the appropriate balance and placement of simplicity in the product, and the exposure of complexity to the end user. Tackling these issues during the design process is the best approach to displace complexity from where it would otherwise end up: the users’ experience.
A couple of older notes about emergent information architecture, the first by Peter Merholz, who talks about the range of architectures from those explicitly created by the user to those implicitly derived from user behavior – with tags a hybrid: "They’re explicit in that people have to engage in some explicit act of applying the tag. They’re implicit because the aggregate of that tagging leads to folksonomies and other social metadata that starts making connections between information that was not there before." The other post, by Gene Smith, is about how people co-create information environments, looking not only at the x-axis from implicit to explicit, but also factoring in a y-axis of personal to participatory. These are from back in July, so not new; I ran across them via a post by Adrian Chong at the now-defunct iaslash. (Archives still available to dig through... still yielding goodies.)
Isaac Mao to Google on its presence in China: Don't forget to "do no evil." [Link]
During the National Day holiday week in 2002, when Google.com was blocked in China for the first time, Chinese Google users made an online protest spontaneously. They appealed to free the purer search engine wave by wave. Its seemed its also the first time grassroots power was demonstrated in China on Internet. You can imagine how eager they are to have a complete Internet instead of a shrinked one. At last, people won, Google backed. However, after 4 years, we started to question whether we should continue to support Google. Many users here were disappointed when they found Google.cn filtered many keywords. The compromise remarks by you in Davos made us more frustrated. Seems you are adopting self-censorship which hurts those loyal users a lot which also devalue your motto of "non-evil".
Google is ever regarded not only a leading Internet business, but a hope for many people around the world to open their thinking. Many bloggers in China still believes that in their everyday writings. We guess you were misled by incomplete information on how censorship is good to Chinese people. The fact is Google in the 130M-Internet-Users country is losing loyal users with loosing your principles. We understand its tough to anyone to make decisions. But it high time to change it back to the right track. Here we would like to propose 3 ideas to Google for its China strategy in a long term run, to survive, and live better...
The New Yorker profiles Joel Surnow, co-creator and producer of "24." Surnow is a neoconservative who wouldn't think of toning down the show's torture scenes, let alone showing what real, legal interrogations are like. [Link]
Surnow’s rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced “The Path to 9/11,” a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. (The show was denounced as defamatory by Democrats and by members of the 9/11 Commission; their complaints led ABC to call the program a “dramatization,” not a “documentary.”) Surnow and Nowrasteh met in 1985, when they worked together on “The Equalizer.” Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. He told me that he and Surnow, in addition to sharing an admiration for Reagan, found “L.A. a stultifying, stifling place because everyone thinks alike.” Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard “24” as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”
In recent years, Surnow and Nowrasteh have participated in the Liberty Film Festival, a group dedicated to promoting conservatism through mass entertainment. Surnow told me that he would like to counter the prevailing image of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a demagogue and a liar. Surnow and his friend Ann Coulter—the conservative pundit, and author of the pro-McCarthy book “Treason”—talked about creating a conservative response to George Clooney’s recent film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Surnow said, “I thought it would really provoke people to do a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero or, maybe, someone with a good cause who maybe went too far.” He likened the Communist sympathizers of the nineteen-fifties to terrorists: “The State Department in the fifties was infiltrated by people who were like Al Qaeda.” But, he said, he shelved the project. “The blacklist is Hollywood’s orthodoxy,” he said. “It’s not a movie I could get done now.”
This is the first year I've watched episodes of "24" – it seemed to me that the show's stayed above the liberal conservative dualism to an extent. There are bad guys on both sides. What disturbs me more than the show's politics is the unrelenting focus on torture. The author of the New Yorker piece, Jane Mayer, tells how U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point and three real interrogators met with the "24" team to try to convince them to stop showing violent and clearly illegal interrogations by U.S. operatives.
Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”
The sense of the article: that's not gonna happen.
I'm not going to give "24" any more of my time... and I find it a bit unsettling that a show espousing torture as necessary and practical is seeping its memes into the collective very-unconscious. If its audience went away, so would "24."
Jeff Veen interviews Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google. (Which I could catch their followup discussion at Adaptive Path's conference, "Managing Experience through Creative Leadership," in San Francisco tomorrow.) Interesting brief perspective on Google's approach to development and design. [Link]
JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?
IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it. So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.
My friend and former colleague Tiffany Lee Brown published an acknowledgement of FringeWare, Inc., a company that Paco Nathan and I cofounded in 1992. She includes the mission statement I wrote, which includes memes I still support. [Link]
Fringe Ware, Inc., is a small commercial enterprise dedicated to community development around a fringe marketplace, where the edges of diverse alternative cultures intersect. We feel that the Market is the core of any community, and sick markets mean sick communities… just look around.
FWI acknowledges the essential importance of trade, but our mission is to create a context for E. F. Schumacher's "Economics as if People Mattered."
What's in the Fringe Market? We focus on publications, events, and products that we find interesting, fun, and enlightening. We publish printed and electronic periodicals including Fringe Ware Review, TAZMedia, and Unshaved Truths; operate a retail bookstore and mail order service selling street tech, gizmos, wearable subversive memes, etc.; host an Internet mailing list for information from/about the cultural and technological fringes; and organize events with other organizations on the Fringes.
We're learning that people can survive quite nicely without huge corporations, huge governments, and huge dogmas pushing their lives. So here is the FWI alternative: start your own corporation. Trade with other like-minded people throughout the global village. Encourage innovation and promote entrepeneurship. Promote fair, cooperative business practices. Emphasize products that facilitate creativity, health, and play. Explore consciousness alternatives. Build community through advanced, available technologies, e.g. computer networks. Respect and consider the natural environment by promoting sustainable resource use. Have fun, be weird, and make what it takes to survive.
Welcome to the fringes of art, technology, and society. From here innovation emerges, and here survival, through cooperation and use of the unexpected, counts. --Thanx!
It must be in the air, like Peaches en Regalia: yesterday I was thinking how much I miss Frank Zappa - his crazy beautiful music and his passionate defense of free speech. This morning Adam Thierer blogging similar thoughts about Zappa at The Technology Liberation Front. [Link]
When he was with us, he was one of the most passionate and articulate defenders of freedom of speech--not just in the entertainment industry--but in all of America. And this man knew his history. He understood why the First Amendment was so important to America's founding and why it remains one of the cornerstones upon which all other human liberties rest.
The New York Times has created a visualization of casualties in Iraq. Above is a piece of it, but you should ch eck out the whole thing. It's big, but then so's the list of casualties. Here's the legend:
I was surprised to learn, from one of my acquaintances on The WELL, that Wordpress.com (the Wordpress hosted service) doesn't allow her to post Amazon Associates links. They go so far as to filter those links and any other form of advertising. Someone evidently told her that there's some sort of security issue, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They just don't want users posting ads, unless they're VIPs. As much as I like Wordpress, this really rubs me the wrong way... I'm enough of a libertarian to see this as excessive control. It's also annoying that Wordpress uses the term "VIP," which is like saying the average Wordpress.com user isn't important enough to do whatever they want with their blog.
I think I understand why they have (i.e. Matt has) adopted this policy. If you've ever seen a blogspot blog that was created just for link spam and ads, you'll get it. But I think preventing the average user from posting an Amazon associates text link is excessive control.
Twelve writing tips from George Orwell, author of 1984 among others. I was't exactly bowled over by Orwell's writing, but these are good enough that I figure I should read his stuff again (as if I would ever find the time). The best tip: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." [Link]
The Holy Modal Rounders just might've been the greatest sixties band, or at least the band that best personified the combination of psychedelic visionary giggle and subversive anarchy that merged into the Great Lost Vibe of sixties subcultural evolution. Something was happening that you can really read about our hear in a song, you had to feel it, and hopefully you can get a sense of it through a Rounders documentary that Ed Ward's just told me about, called Bound to Lose Always a fan of the Rounders, I've never seen them play, and I'm amazed/delighted to see that Pete Stampfel and Steve Weber are still playing. Many know them only through their whacky "If you want to be a bird," from "The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders," a tune everbody heard because it was part of the "Easy Rider" soundtrack. Lots more to hear...
When fiddler Peter Stampfel collided with guitarist Steve Weber during the "Great Folk Scare" of the early sixties in New York, the two musicians formed a powerful bond based on their shared fascination with American roots music and early psychedelia. Dubbing themselves The Holy Modal Rounders, these eccentric outsiders have been playing their unique brand of psychedelic folk for over four decades, barely surviving on the fringes of the music industry while drawing a dedicated following of luminaries and lunatics. From their origins in New York's Greenwich Village folk scene and their involvement in the Easy Rider soundtrack, to the lost years of constant drug use, endless touring and a final shot at redemption, Bound To Lose recounts the unique forty-year history of these true American originals. With startling intimacy, Bound to Lose also documents the band's arduous, amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking struggle to capitalize on their recent resurgence in popularity, culminating in an unpredictable 40th anniversary concert in Portland, Oregon. More than just a chronicle of an obscure band, Bound To Lose is a raucous celebration of a lost American outlaw subculture as it draws its final rebellious breaths.
Barbara Kooyman's featured in this week's Austin Chronicle cover story, which talks about her years as one half of Timbuk 3 and the genesis of her latest project, Texamericana, an online store that sells CDs and potentially other media, and gives part fo the proceeds to public radio.
"Texamericana is based on giving away 100% of the projected proceeds to things that will make your grandmother smile," grins Kooyman. "It protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press by supporting listener-sponsored radio. It relieves social insecurity by contributing to a community organization that feeds the hungry or houses the homeless. It supports environmental integrity which will give all of us a livable, breathable planet."
Recording artists, radio stations and music business associates – check out the Texamericana Social Hour at Threadgill's, followed by live music. "Some folks still believe in the power of music."
I shot video of the Intel building demolition this morning. Got up late; I would've missed it if not for the kids on bicycles that were cruising too close, delaying demolition as police tried to track 'em down and clear the area. Downtown was packed, but a lucked into a parking spot a few blocks away and made it to the site minutes before the blast. I was standing by the KVUE crew and probably popped up, unkempt, in the news coverage. They were all set to interview the guy who won the contest push the plunger and trigger the blast, but he was called to do the deed before he got a word out. The blast vibrated my bones, but it didn't quite seem to flatten the building. The resulting cloud of dust made for a creepy 9/11 deja vu.
I first used Flickr after Stewart Butterfield showed the beta (or was it alpha?) version in the halls at the Emerging Technology Conference a few years ago. It was klunky in its first form, but it just got better and better; over the last couple of years it's been a system I point to when I talk about best examples of "Web 2.0" applications. A couple of weeks ago, Flickr Uploadr stopped working the way it should. Uploadr is a downloadable utility that makes it much easier to upload many photos at once. When I say it stopped working, I mean that it would break connection consistently after uploading one or two photos, which made it particularly useless. I searched for evidence that others were having this problem, and finally found a mention in the help forums, starting with a post on February 11. How did Flickr respond? Not particularly well - they blamed the users' network connections and pointed to a help file with advice for users experiencing slow uploads. It doesn't appear that the Flickroids investigated whether their own system might be screwy, and when other users chimed in with the same problem, they just stopped repsonding. (Note that uploads work normally via their web interface, which only handles six at a time, and nobody seems to be having problems with other network connections, just Flickr).
I'm feeling irritated, because Flickr is broken and they don't seem to be doing anything to fix it. However I see that they have other problems on their mind, such as a server scramble that served images (including porn) to the wrong accounts on the sysem. Note to Stewart, Yahoo, et al - I'm surprised you're not reponding on the Uploadr issue and I'm surprised the technology's unraveling. I'm hopeful that you'll sort things out, and Flickr will be usable again.
Scot Casey, who joined the crew at FringeWare, Inc. after I was already out the door, has put together a FringeWare chronology. It's very weird for me to look at the chronology, and especially to see quotes from Brad King's Postcards from the Fringe, a somewhat inaccurate account of FringeWare history (or it would logically seem that way to me, since it pretty much skips my own role and involvement).
Scot's overview is very cool to see, and it definitely brings back memories of those thrilling days of yesteryear...
