The world is so unbalanced (if not spinning out of control); it's a hopeful sign that Microsoft is acquiring Yahoo, potentially creating a balance for Google's net dominance. I'd rather see Godzilla fight a worthy opponent, a Megalon or Mothra, than stomp puny humans as they flee. [Link]

If you're in a Super Tuesday state, planning to vote as a Democrat, and you're still ambivalent over your choices, check out Larry Lessig's reasoned consideration of the Obama candidacy, which he supports. In his video, Lessig says why he is convinced, as I am, that Obama is the right choice: he will lead, he will inspire, and he has the best position and attitude to undo the very real damage to this country, after almost sixteen years of polarizing, corrupt politics. We need more than a competent administrator - we need a true leader.

Following Facebook's lead, MySpace is gearing up to accommodate third-party applications via the MySpace Developer Platform. [Link to MIT Tech Review article] [Link to Developer Platform page at MySpace]

Very interesting info from MySpace on the page that discusses their adoption of Open Social... tragedy of the commons:

While unrestrained CSS and HTML provided users with limitless ways to make their profiles look a certain way, it was JavaScript that allowed them to really plug into the MySpace experience. After MySpace launched, users began building JavaScript widgets that did anything from customizing friends lists to sending MySpace Mail. And applications they coded were not limited to their own profiles. Through a little known technology known as "cut and paste", users could "install" applications they liked on their own profiles.

Where did all this functionality come from? While no specific XML/JSON api was provided, users quickly wrote and disseminated scripts that used JavaScript to screen scrape the existing MySpace markup (in order to gather data), and to emit the proper http values to manipulate the data they gathered.

Of course, a completely open MySpace was a utopic ideal. The exploitation began. As nefarious people began perceiving value in having lots of illegitimate friends, causing mischief, and/or making a profit through spam, they began writing applications that broke the rules. While a well thought out, law abiding "send me a message" app would send messages only at the request of the user, an app built by a spammer would send as many messages as the user's bandwidth would allow.

As spammers propagated through the site, MySpace began blacklisting certain types of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We tried very hard to keep as much JavaScript as possible, but slowly and surely illegitimate users hacked away at our filters until finally JavaScript was banned entirely. That left third party application developers with only one dyanmic alternative: Flash. Sites like YouTube saw their birth as widely disseminated Flash decorations for MySpace profiles. Unfortunately, by this time such applications were completely locked out of the MySpace data stream.

Has Thane Heins, an inventor who dropped out of college, created a perpetual motion machine? [Link]

"It's hard for me to give an opinion," said Zahn, who admitted he was excited to see the demonstration. "I don't believe it will violate the laws of physics. You're not going to get more energy out than you put in."

He said it's easy for people to set up their tests wrong and misinterpret what they see. "You've got to look closely."

It's now Jan. 28 - D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.

Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped - and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."

In a world where digital convergence is accelerating and all media, all data are increasingly digital, copies are super abundant, therefore worthless/free. In that context, what has value? Kevin Kelly's been thinking about this. He explains that what's "scarce and valuable" is stuff that can't be copied. He talks about "eight generatives better than free" - e.g. immediacy, personlization, authenticity, findability...

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.

In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

Nancy White posts about systems change practices, quoting Donella Meadows: "I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms...." [Link]

The image above is one she used at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, which seems pretty cool in itself. (So many conferences, so little time.)

David Isenberg posted about our Worldchanging interview. David did a great job articulating the net neutrality issue...

To simplify, I have proposed - and continue to propose - that the carriers should simply be prohibited from having any financial interest in what they're carrying. Then we could
let the carriers manage their networks without fear that they'd discriminate against traffic that competed with their interests because they would have no competing interests.

This solution, which is called Structural Separation, would guarantee and assure that any network management was for the sole purpose of congestion control, because that would be the carrier's only interest. Any bias in favor of one kind of packet or against another would be, by definition, entirely innocent. As such it could be easily remedied.

Structural Separation would make Network Neutrality simple. Enforcement of the proposition that carriers could have no financial interest in what is carried would be via audit. There would be no big fat complex rule book. There would be no government intervention in processes the government is not competent to govern. The carriers would behave, and the network would be de jure neutral. Simple.

But the political process to get from "here" to "there" would be as complex as the carriers could make it.

Very cool idea: using a Tesla coil as a guitar amp. (Thanks to Adam Rice, who posted the link on Twitter).

Burnt Orange Report has a very good analysis of Obama's chances in the Texas primary/caucuses. The key is to have a good turnout at the caucuses at the end of the day. [Link]

Of course, this discussion has only focused on the "primary" portion of Texas' primary/caucus system. Texas' caucuses begin at 7:15 PM after the polls close on Election Day, March 4th. Texas caucuses are an entirely separate election process for determining an entirely separate portion of national delegates. A candidate could win the primary but lose the caucuses to a better organized opponent.

Key Point: The Texas caucus system awards the candidate with the most active voters who return to vote a second time at 7:15 PM on Election Day, and there's absolutely no question that Senator Obama is absolutely dominating the caucuses.

Senator Obama could come close to Senator Clinton in the "primary" portion and dominate the "caucus" portion --- the only catch is that those 67 votes that come from the "caucus" system won't be known until June and the Texas Democratic Party Convention.

Chris Messina's updated his OpenID Hitlist/Shitlist. [Link]

...via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.

"This project allows us to finally start to see the big picture of how humans are affecting the oceans," said Ben Halpern, assistant research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led the research. "Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me."

Saturday I hung out at Obama's Austin HQ in the morning, and visited Clinton's HQ (where Bill Clinton spoke) in the evening.  Doesn't matter which candidate you're tracking or supporting: we have real  hope here. In the Bush 43 years, we've seen America at its worse, and we felt we were losing it - but we never quite lost hope, because we knew there would be a change, mandatory and inevitable, after eight years of - what's a tactful word?  Difficulty. We can hope for repairs, and soon.

On the other hand, my friend Jasmina Tesanovic reports that "the language of war is the daily bread in Serbia. The sirens of nationalism are turned on again, as if nothing had changed in the eight years after Milosevic was toppled." Kosovo declared independence. Jasmina's hopeful, though, too:

May it be a beginning of new era; may our children never have another war with their neighbors just because they speak a different language and have a different sign on their graves. The Balkans have always been a multiethnic territory. No matter who wins the battle, nobody will be able to win a war.

His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. Austin
filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him "the Stanley
Kubrick of design." He fairly burns with passion for his life and work,
and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a
conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and
experimentalism, and his work with Criterion meets at the dirty
crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and
the bottom line, the movement of "product," the allure of the dream
made cardboard, laser-encoded plastic discs, at midnight, beneath a
full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest.

If you're a subscriber to Weblogsky via email or RSS, you might've received duplicate posts. This is because I experimented with the Firefox plugin ScribeFire for posting here. It was too good to be true - publishing was easy, but I found that the posts I was creating via Scribefire were somehow not appearing in the entries list at Movable Type - some quirk of publishing via the API. Furthermore, the posts would disappear from the main index, then reappear if I published again via ScribeFire. There's no real support for ScribeFire - the plugin's site has forums, but it's all problem posts, no responses. I could find nothing online about the problem I was having. This morning I reposted all the entries from ScribeFire... back to the old, clunky way of posting. Might be a good time to consider moving to the light, facile Wordpress platform.

An idea whose time has come - help Larry decide to run for, and change, Congress.

CNN fired Chez Pazienza for blogging at Huffington post - not just because he broke a vague rule by blogging, but because of the content of his blog. [Link]

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

From Jasmina Tesoanovic's blog:

2.21.2008

9 a.m Morning, a big silence in the streets: even some schools will be closed because of the planned rally in the afternoon, 5 p.m.

1 p.m

Buses from all over Serbia are coming into Belgrade city. The buses and trains are free, state-organized for people to come and perform the big show with the official title "Kosovo is Serbia." This is the motto that runs constantly on national TV channels.

My friend from inner Serbia wanted to come to Belgrade in a free ride, to have a coffee with me and then go back home. But then, maybe better not to be seen around you, he said, you are a notorious Woman in Black, somebody might hurt you.

The official organizers, meaning all Serbian political parties except for the 5 percent dissidents, all claim that Belgrade has to show its real face: that of a calm dignified Serb. And what about is calm and dignified about the busted MacDonald's, burning embassies and window-broken shops with foreign names? Those are nothing compared to the loss of Kosovo, justify our high-ranked officials on almost all tv channels.

My father lives behind the Parliament, while I live next to the biggest church in the Balkans. The official rally starts in front of the Parliament where Kostunica the premier will give a public speech, and it ends with a prayer in the church. They estimate that all the streets in between will be full of people, just as crowded as Belgrade was during the toppling of Milosevic in 2000, or the Djindjic funeral in 2003. I attended those two events, it was my conscience, it was my duty. This particular rally I will omit, although I am curious and I would love to see their faces.

On the stage it will be the usual crowd, really: Serbian prominent nationalists , like the world famous film director Kusturica and the president of Bosnian Serbs Dodik maybe somewhere in the crowd. The war criminals are hiding in the massive crowds too: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. Rumor says they are both in Belgrade now. . Before the rally began, I crossed the square in front of the Parliament. A lot of half drunk teenagers, turbofolk fans, and the sad, miserable and angry people I used to see in Milosevic rallies. It is a lovely spring day, but instead of relaxing I trembled: what if something goes wrong and massive violence bursts out? Who is responsible now for riotous damage to our lives and property? Nobody and everybody, really; Kosovo Albanian or Serbians apart, Belgrade itself is the only place at risk today.

I hear phrases on TV such as "Kosovo is the heart cut from the body of Serbia," and also lamentations about how much money was lost there, for instance in coal mines. These seem absurdly large sums for such a poor province -- who lost those investments, I wonder?

A big, nationalist, screaming speech by our prime minister. I don't remember ever hearing Kostunica so angry, loud and pathetic, like an aging rock star, this guy who hardly ever addresses his people. He is calling various world powers bad names and condemning the fake state of Kosovo, almost publicly cursing them. And extolling the Great Serbs with their pride and honor.

Now Putin is a Slavic hero. He swears oaths, uses words like life, death, Serbs, brothers, freedom, blood and all that; here in 21 century.

World famous stars are here too: Novak Djokovic the tennis player speaks like a robot on the screen, saying he will never let go of Kosovo. Emir Kusturica the film director interrupted his movie in US and came to speak live in Belgrade. The prime minister calls him a Serb -- actually Kusturica has changed his name from the rather unl-Slavic "Emir" to "Nemanja," the ancient Serbian king. The swaggering film director speaks against the local traitors and calls them "mice." The mice would be us, me, Women in Black. He says he doesn't not believe in Hollywood myth but in Kosovo myths. Why embrace myths at all?

In the meantime, on my blog, which I put up to follow the news in the city: Turkish and Croatian embassies attacked, a Nike shop looted. Where are the police? They claim this is the biggest meeting ever held in Belgrade.

Close to my home, the hooligans are in some pitched conflict with the police. Should I remove my name from my own door? No; when things really get bad in Serbia, the police arrive in company with the hooligans.

The American embassy is attacked right now, 7 00pm, no police around there; the reporter sounds really afraid as he reports the smashing and burning.

The German bank in downtown Belgrade is attacked too: gosh this is like during the NATO bombings, but in reverse.

Tonight at 2 am it will be a full moon eclipse -- Earth Moon and Sun in alignment, a perfect excuse for madness.

Right now I hear that the American embassy is broken into and burning with Molotov cocktails. The TV coverage reminds me of when people looted the parliament to topple Milosevic.

The newly elected president of Serbia is right now in Rumania. He avoided this rally in the last minute, even though his party has backed up the rally.

The country may be on the verge of a state of emergency.

Red Hat sent a cease and desist letter to the Data Portability Group – "don't use our infinity logo." [Link] DPG isn't wasting energy fighting the c&d. They're holding a contest to pick a new logo.

After dropping by the big opening house party last night at Charla's new studio, Marsha, Miranda and I drove to the Capitol area, found a place to park near Brackenridge Hospital, and wandered over to the Obama rally, which had already started by the time we got there. It was crisp, cold, and dark as we walked to the capitol, the moon bright in the sky but tiny, having shrunk as it rose (we had moonrise illusion glowing orange on the horizon earlier as we drove east). As we got closer, I could hear Barack's voice on the wind. When we got there, the dark was shattered by the brightest of showdog lights, really blinding. There was a massive crowd, and you could hear Obama clearly though I couldn't tell you what he said... I wasn't there for the message, I was there for the energy. Blocking the light with my hands, I could see the candidate beyond a sea of people standing, cheering as he hit his points. Mirdanda fiddled with her phone - I think she recorded part of the speech, and I shot some bad photos with the Coolpix. I was thinking how single-minded you have to be to run for president, and how difficult it is to fight the opposition for so many months, then have to heal all wounds quickly to get to the business of running the country. I mostly cringe at the thought of any politician taking the reins at this point, partly because there's such a sorry lot of 'em, but also because I've thinking about politics so long, I have a better sense what it's all about. But Obama makes me cringe less. And unlike Dean, he's had the political savvy and the toughness and character to succeed without the blessing of the traditional Democrats, who clearly support Hillary. (Nothing against Dean, he just didn't have the savvy - he's probably a lot smarter now than he was in 2004). Hillary has many strengths, and if there had been no Obama her nomination would be certain. But Obama is speaking to something that the traditional party can't quite grasp. He seems to be on a different plane, in the world but not of the world, and that's very appealing, especially after eight years of worst case governance. Following the worst president ever, competence and experience aren't quite enough. I think either Democratic candidate could win, given the mood of the country, but who can lead most effectively?

Maggie Duval coordinated the production of this cool little commercial for our big Plutopia event at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a tech/futurist/art/green collective that Derek Woodgate and I instigated. It's turned into a smart mob with crew attached.

This is a test post - I'm trying out Windows Live Writer. Even if it works fine, it doesn't feel particularly handy... but after my recent bad experiences with ScribeFire and Ecto, I'll be interested to see if Microsoft got it right.

The Austin Chronicle has published my article about Facebook in its SXSW Interactive issue.

Are we watching a generation "slice in two," or are these sites making visible, and emphasizing, a division that already existed? Before the social Web, most of us didn't know we were part of social networks. We had friends, and we knew that our friends might know people that we don't, but most of us never thought to chart or analyze those relationships. Now we can make our networks visible and explicit and touch base with them every day through sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are we any better off than we were before? Do we know the people in our networks any better than before? Can we manage more relationships than we did before? Looking at the darker side, will we be exploited by the operators of network platforms? Will everything we say and do actually, no foolin', become part of our "permanent record," tracked by Big Brother and his henchmen? Will the Internet become the next television, an instrument for programming consumers, pretending to be a channel for art and entertainment?

Yes to everything. Yes, we're better off; there can be tremendous value in network exchanges and far more potential for productive collaboration and resulting innovation. We probably do know most of the people in our networks better; we can connect to them casually every day, like the Internet was a massive water cooler where everybody, and I mean everybody, can hang out. Can we manage more relationships? Sure, but that's deceptive: We have the technology to manage more, but that doesn't mean we can manage all the relationships that we "add" at any qualitative level. All the social-networking platforms caution you to add as friends only people you really know well. Real value depends on quality, not quantity, of relationships.

And yes, some people will be exploited, but network platforms that exploit will lose trust, lose users, wither, and die. Yes, everything we do online is recorded somewhere and probably retrievable somehow by somebody, and the intelligence agencies are probably crunching some of your data somewhere sometime. There's never been any real expectation of complete privacy online. On the other hand, it's impractical to think that Big Brother is watching. His eyeballs and his interests are constrained by an economy of attention, if nothing else. And the Internet's already become the next television, but it has a bazillion channels, many with ads, and many of the ads that do appear are unobtrusive. Austin tech consultant and entrepreneur Venki Iyer told me, "We all just need to get used to surveillance and practice good sousveillance [watching the watchers]."

The phenomenal (and probably phenomenological) surfer physicist Garrett Lisi manifested advanced creative physics at the TED conference. [Link]

Referencing the Large Hadron Collider, he tells us about the "whole zoo" of subatomic paricles, the 226 particles we know about, including simple particles like electrons and quarks, and their "second and third generation" relatives, which exist at much higher masses. He talks about the forces that effect each particle - the weak, strong, gravity and mass. A major hope for the Large Hadron Collider is that it will allow us to detect the Higgs Boson, which should give mass to other particles.

Lisi shows us force maps of particles, organized in terms of hypercharge and weak charges. They organize into symmetrical patterns - these symmetries are the result of projecting from 4D into 2D. "These pictures are not just pretty - they tell us what's allowed to happen." A great deal of progress has been made in physics by drawing these maps ad looking to see what's missing - broken symmetries often reveal particles that are supposed to exist.