Weblogsky

Weblogsky migration: news feeds

2008-09-21T14:31:25Z

I've moved Weblogsky from the Movable Type platform to Wordpress. The Movable Type blog still exists at http://weblogsky.com/index2.html, and all the old archived posts are still there. If you subscribe to the Weblogsky news feed via Feedburner, you don't need to make any changes. If you subscribe via the old RSS or Atom feed addresses, change to either http://weblogsky.com/wp/feed/ or http://feeds.feedburner.com/Weblogsky Onward!

One Web Day Austin

2008-09-18T13:52:39Z

Working with the phenomenal Maggie Duval, Cafe Caffeine, and Austin Jelly instigator Dusty Reagan, we've put together Austin's own One Web Day celebration - Monday, September 22 at Cafe Caffeine. We'll have speakers all day, from 10:30am to 8:15pm, during a special One Web Day Jelly. Sign up at Eventbrite or just show up! More about One Web Day

The Whole Earth Catalog Remembered

2008-09-16T13:45:07Z

Plenty Magazine has a remembrance of the Whole Earth Catalog with comments by several who were involved or influenced. Whole Earth certainly influenced my evolution, in fact determined my career path. The Plenty intro is inaccurate in that it mentions only on the Catalog's "four year run," but if Whole Earth had gone away after four years, the influence wouldn't have been the same. Whole Earth's life was extended many more years through the publication of Coevolution Quarterly, later renamed Whole Earth Review, then Whole Earth Magazine – now sadly defunct. I wasn't much into computers and technology until Whole Earth announced in 1985 that it was launching a BBS called the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) which was accessible from anywhere by modem. I bought a computer and modem and dialed in via long distance to Sausalito, and that was my first adoption of social technology. Via the WELL I connected with Whole Earth, met then-editor Howard Rheingold and past editor Kevin Kelly, established a relationship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and got involved in the formation of EFF-Austin, became an associate editor of bOING bOING the 'zine and book review editor for Factsheet Five, was involved in a private discussion with a group of people who were starting a magazine called Wired, connected with Wired's HotWired online service and started the Electronic Frontiers Forum there, met Paco Nathan and formed FringeWare, Inc., found writers for Fringe Ware Review (which was incidentally modeled on Whole Earth Review), became part of Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, worked with Bruce Sterling on the Mirrorshades conference and later on Viridian Design, and became an early blogger, initially publishing via the public_html directory of my WELL account. Having met the Whole Earth crew, I did some writing for Whole Earth Review, including my global warming piece in the Sterling-edited last issue. I was editor of the Consciousness Subdomain of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog – sort of a dream come true – and coordinated a Whole Earth party in Austin while the team was here (with Wavy Gravy along for the ride) for their publisher's annual meeting. My bOING bOING colleague Mark Frauenfelder turned me onto blogger, and there was early back and forth with Mark and Cory Doctorow as the bOING bOING blog was evolving – and we were all using the Whole Earth format in blogging, where there was a review of something followed by quoted excerpts. Many bloggers adopted this format, probably because they used the popular bOING bOING blog as a model. I'm pretty sure the Internet wouldn't be what it is today if Whole Earth and the WELL had never existed. The influence was way more than a blog format. Those of us who read the Whole Earth publications were inspired to be eclectic and creative in our thinking, and to question everything, especially our own assumptions. There's more I could say, but I've run out of time. I wish Whole Earth Magazine was still around. The last issue, edited by Alex Steffen as a precursor to Worldchanging, was never published due to a lack of funds. Attempts to raise enough money to revive the publication failed, and it went away. Time for a revival? Some things cycle out and can't be revived, but Whole Earth could rise again, I think, with the right set of instigators. What was your experience of the Whole Earth Catalog?

Not said in jest

2008-09-15T05:13:30Z

That's a photo of David Foster Wallace shot by Steve Rhodes. I can't find the review of Infinite Jest that I wrote for Wired Magazine's web site Hotwired, and I haven't read Wallace (or much fiction, other than my unfinished but in-progress marathon read of Pynchon's Against the Day, but I'm affected by his suicide, by the sense that that amazing aggregation of words and ideas and hot synapses could suddenly be still, just like that, and we'll hear nothing more from him. Authors are smart and sensitive and vulnerable. The best think about everything and try to find, and tell, the truth. I wanted to be one of those but didn't follow the discipline, and I clearly wasn't prepared to suffer for my art, and it hadn't sunk in that the suffering is there anyway, a condition of life. That's not meant to be fatalistic, but I'm acknowledging the Buddhist sense of suffering as attachment. I'm not a great Buddhist, but I practice enough to have a sense of that attachment, what it means, why the Buddha connected attachment to suffering in expressing his Noble Truths. The attachment is as much as anything a grasping at words and ideas and concepts and supposed-but-not-really truths, all churning forth from some emptiness within. I can imagine any author, surfing the terrible waves of consciousness and trying to hold a vertical position against the forces of the universe, frustrated by grasping, unable to go with the flow, and ultimately considering that death might bring peace. That's a terrible tragedy. My editor at Hotwired wondered that I hadn't mentioned the tennis in the book. The thousand plus pages has threads about tennis and about drug rehab. I recall that I as more interested in addiction than tennis at the time, but I suppose they could be the same thing (and related to the titular samizdat). I was sinking into the long lucid passages and losing their connection to the whole sometimes. I knew I needed to go back and read it again with no rush against deadline, and I wanted to read Wallace's other works. One of those things you put off. The books are still there to read, but I'll never have a conversation with Wallace... it's like finding out that Bill Hicks died after saying for so long that I'll have to catch him sometime. Speaking of comedy, Frank Bruni wrote of Wallace, in the New York Times Magazine in 1996, "Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone." In 2005, he gave a commencement address at Kenyon Collegein Ohio, saying that it "is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head." He went on to say that "learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

Making it: our diy future

2008-09-11T13:56:59Z

I'm not exactly a maker - I don't spend a lot of time building or deconstructing devices or hacking what I've bought. I'm not a regular reader of Make Magazine, though it's edited by my friend and former bOING bOING colleague Mark Frauenfelder, and I've always appreciated his world view... Mark's a mashup of wide-eyed innocent and wise sage, and his head's all full of fascinating cartoons and futuristic visions. When I curated a digital convergence track for SXSW Interactive in 2006, I included a session on DIY and convergence and contacted Mark, who suggested Phil Torrone, who signed on and suggested Limor Fried and someone from Make's sister magazine, Craft. It was a great session; the next year Phil and Limor keynoted to a packed room at the conference. I realized there was a huge DIY movement emerging and they were channeling those energies. Consider that the world of the future may not be a slick, standardized manufactured environment but a world of personal reconfigurable environments, highly individualized; a world where everyone's expected to have gadget literacy and everything in our environment has an open, hackable architecture. A couple of years ago, after the first Maker Faire in California, I emailed Mark and suggested they try it in Austin. They did, and as a result I found myself working an installation on the DIY Home of the Future based on Derek Woodgate's research and Dave Demaris's hard work, along with Bon Davis and several others. (Our Plutopia collective and annual party emerged from this endeavor - long story.) I wrote a couple of DIY home pieces for Worldchanging at the time, posted here and here. Derek had done a lot of thinking about the future of personal built environments, again highly reconfigurable by "the user." This assumes a couple of things: 1) that we evolve the gadget literacy I mentioned earlier, and we see that in the DIY/Maker movement as early adopters on the today's fringes, and 2) homes and gadgets and devices will be increasingly open, hackable, and reconfigurable. To that end, Make has published a Maker's Bill of Rights, and Jeremy Faludi at Worldchanging riffs on the concept, discussing design for hackability as green design. Note that the Bill of Rights page at Make has a link to the Leatherman Squirt, aka "Warranty Voider."

Steven Levy on Chrome

2008-09-03T02:18:15Z

Steve Levy's written a thorough account of the development of Google's new browser, Chrome. I've been test driving Chrome tonight, and the wheels turn mighty fast.

Speed may be Chrome's most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better - you've made something new. "As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they'll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them," Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft's worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.

Coordinated online response to Hurricane Gustav

2008-09-01T13:44:32Z

Looking for something similar to the Katrina PeopleFinder project that I worked on in 2005, I found that Andy Carvin and others created a Gustav Wiki using Mediawiki, as well as a Gustav Information Center using the social network platform, Ning. I signed up to help garden the wiki and, if needed, help coordinate addition of shelter information with something like the Katrina ShelterFinder team. (ShelterFinder proved arguably more useful than PeopleFinder in the wake of Katrina). If you're wiki-adept and good at finding and organizing information, volunteer here. Assuming it isn't duplication of effort (I saw only one other person working on it), I'd like to organize a team to compile and maintain shelter info. Let me know if you're interested.

Chasing the Flame

2008-08-22T15:26:38Z

"Chasing the Flame" is a blog advocating for "a smarter U.S. foreign policy," extending the work of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed in a bombing in Iraq in 2003. A post there by Jonathan Prentice, on the subject of intelligent empathy, caught my eye.

Intelligent empathy will mean finding effective ways to hear the views of those most affected and bring them into dialogues from which they are typically excluded - and to do this at the outset of a policy initiative, not as an afterthought. It will mean recognising that these individuals must own a process as much as those in power or the international community do. It will require patience and the imagination to find, and find ways of reaching out, to new partners; it will require a willingness to deal with messy assymmetry; and it will require a conviction that the end goal of a just and sustainable outcome rather than a quick victory really is worth striving for – that the pragmatic and the ideal can be united.

History of the Internet?

2008-08-20T14:46:44Z

The National Science Foundation has published "NSF and the Birth of the Internet," including videos of Vint Cerf, GEorge Strawn, and Rick Bina and a timeline for 'net evolution. How accurate is NSF's institutional memory? When Dave Farber posted a link to the video to his "interesting people" list, he got several critical responses that capture much more granular historical info from various perspectives. If you're interested in net.history, you can see those messages in Dave's archive - look for 8/18/2008 and following messages on "NSF and the Birth of the Internet."

Tibetan Sky Burial

2008-08-17T19:44:25Z

In this burial ritual, corpses are dissected and fed to birds of prey. Called jhator, this "is considered an act of generosity: the deceased and his/her surviving relatives are providing food to sustain living beings."

Generosity and compassion for all beings are important virtues or paramita in Buddhism. Although some observers have suggested that jhator is also meant to unite the deceased person with the sky or sacred realm, this does not seem consistent with most of the knowledgeable commentary and eyewitness reports, which indicate that Tibetans believe that at this point life has completely left the body and the body is simply meat.

[Wikipedia Link] [Eyewitness Account by Pamela Logan]

humdog

2008-08-15T13:04:40Z

Erika Whiteway just emailed me that Carmen Hermosillo, aka humdog, died. I looked for an obit and found a post by my former FringeWare partner, Paco Nathan. "Among those who formed the core of FringeWare," he says, "Humdog becomes the first of us to go to our ancestors." Tiffany Lee Brown reports that there'll be a memorial service in Second Life tomorrow. I met humdog in the Mondo 2000 forum that RU Sirius and I were hosting on the WELL, where I also met Tiffany and Erika... and recruited all three to become substantial voices in the FringeWare community. Carmen was a fearless passionate poet. I never saw her face. We all have demons, and Carmen's demons and mine were set at odds in the end, something I always regretted terribly. We have finite relationships throughout our lives and we should respect and support all of them, a lesson I learned too late to fix some of my own deep connections that were broken, carelessly and without much thought, in the 90s. I looked for a humdog poem to quote here, and found this translation she'd done, which seems appropriate: for elisa so that you can read them with your gray eyes, so that you can sing them with your clear voce, so that they would move you deeply, i made these poems, myself. so that they may find asylum in your heart so that you can give them youth, and color, and heat, three things that i can no longer give them, i made these poems, myself. so that you could take pleasure in my happiness, so that you could suffer yourself with my pain, so that you could feel the vibrancy of my life, i made these poems, myself. so that i could place before you the offerings of my life, and my love, with its spirit, broken dreams, laughter, tears, i made these poems, myself. -Gustavo Adolfo Becquer -translated from the Spanish by C. Hermosillo 16 May 1997

Predictably Irrational

2008-08-13T17:06:45Z

I haven't read Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, but I sat in on an hour-plus phone interview Brian Massey led with Dan last night at a Bootstrap Web meeting, and I was impressed by his insight, based no diligent research into into irrational thinking and its impact on our behavior and decisions. Decison-making is difficult and complex, and it's worth studying how we decide what we want, which always happens in context. We make relative comparisions. He mentioned how Olympic Bronze medal winners are happier than Silver medal winners, because the silver winners are thinking, "damn, a little better and I could've had the gold," whereas bronze winners are thinking "wow, a little worse and I would've had zilch." He also discussed how Starbuck's created an experience that differentiated them from Dunkin Donuts, though both derive significant revenues from beverage sales. He also noted Dunkin Donuts' advantage in sales: their coffee drinks are really mostly coffee, where as Starbucks' coffee drinks are mostly milk, which is more expensive. Dan has many snippets of insight as videos on his site (via YouTube). Here's an example, on relativity:

(A podcast of last night's conversation is forthcoming; I'll post a link when it's available.)

Stalder on Shirky

2008-08-12T13:28:54Z

Interesting critique of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody by media theorist Felix Stalder. [Link]

This tension between commercial and social interests points to another dimension of Web2.0 that is completely missing from Shirky's book: the new division of labour, this time between paid and unpaid. He rightly points out that we are witnessing a ‘mass amateurisation’, and explains this by way of an example. Racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end. However, driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things (like arriving at work on time). So, through a combination of new technological tools and new cooperative strategies certain professions - photography, publishing, journalism, etc. - are becoming amateurised and their professional products find themselves in competition with ‘user generated content’. Is this pointing the way to a 'post-capitalist' society, as envisioned by the Oekonux project? You might think so, given the total absence of economic dimensions in this book. But, I suspect that Shirky would laugh at such a notion all the way to be bank. As a consultant to many media companies he must be keenly aware of the strategies to extract, concentrate and appropriate value from all this user generated content. I would love to hear more about it - and I'm sure Shirky knows a lot about it but, unfortunately, he is not telling us.

Is "Web 2.0" a framework for empowerment, or exploitation? Same question of markets in general - empowerment, or exploitation? Or both?

Greenwald followup by Simon Owens

2008-08-07T23:16:39Z

At Bloggasm, Simon Owens has published a very thorough followup to the Glenn Greenwald piece that I blogged recently. Owens spoke with Greenwald:

He compared this hypothetical investigation to ones initiated by other news outlets when reporters had botched stories or false information was published.

"I think first of all that this is a basic principal of journalism, that if you get a story wrong, you explain what happened that led to the bad reporting," Greenwald told me. "That’s what the New York Times did to explain how they got those Judy Miller stories wrong. When people get stories wrong, the credibility of the journalistic outlet depends upon them explaining what happened. If Brian Ross wants to say, ‘our sources acted in good faith, they just got it wrong,’ then he needs to explain the basis of that."

Trolls

2008-08-03T22:13:39Z

"The Trolls Among us" is an excellent New York Times article by Mattathias Schwartz, also a staff writer for Good. Schwartz discusses trolling behavior online, focusing especially on /b/, a message board at 4chan.org where trolls (people who intentionally disrupt online communities) hang out – and more specifically on conversations with James Fortuny, "the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman," and Weev, who says "trolling is basically Internet eugenics." The article is a fascinating consideration of what you might call alternative social thinking.

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.