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email delivery Read Weblogsky via email:itinerary EFF-Austin Cyberdawg Social, November 2003. Austin: Wireless Future, ongoing project / meetings; conference (March 12-16) SXSW Interactive, Austin (March 12-16) Polycot Polycot helps organizations determine how to build and use effective web technologies to solve problems, build loyalty, share knowledge, and organize projects. For more information, email consult at weblogsky.com, or check out the Polycot Consulting web site. projects CEO, Polycot Consulting. Polycot is a network services company: network consulting, installation and administration, as well as web solutions (architecture and development). Member of the blog team at Another World (worldchanging.com) Co-Founder of the Austin Wireless City Project Manager of the Wireless Future Project for IC² Institute Associated with Rheingold and Associates, Online Social Networking Moderator and co-administrator at the Dean Issues Forum Writer of various interviews, reviews, essays, and articles. President of EFF-Austin Member, Board of Directors, Austin Freenet Local advisor for South by Southwest Interactive Steering Committee Member and Webmaster, Austin Clean Energy Initiative Member of the blog team for Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs weblog. Cohost of The WELL's Inkwell.vue, discussions and interviews. Webmaestro for Viridian Design Co-instigator of Austin Bloggers Member of Mindjack's Board of Advisors. links worth traveling weblogsky archives Email jonl at weblogsky.com 
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Thursday, May 29, 2003
The Island Chronicles boing-boing's Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair are moving with their two kids to the South Pacific, where they're going to live simply. Mark will be blogging "The Island Chronicles," and we'll be reading carefully. Perhaps while packing. [Link] Tuesday, May 27, 2003 Pighed in Baghdad Pighed really likes to See for Himself, so against all advice, he went to Iraq and poked around while the fires of war were burning. [Link] (From the Conclusion): this is reason enough to visit a warzone; to see, as with love, the limits of humanity. in this way love and war are like a sister and a brother, but orphans; they exist without the rule of their parents, going where they will, with retribution out of site and the world wide-eyed, open, and in arm’s reach.Discuss Pighed in Iraq Monday, May 26, 2003 Dean.com I've contemplated working for Howard Dean. He's the only serious presidential candidate whose organization seems to get the Internet. The only way he can win is via nodal politics. [Link] When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as "the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party." And his efforts might actually be paying off: While many predicted that Dean would fade away once the war was no longer a salient issue, there is little evidence that the former Vermont governor's supporters—originally drawn to Dean when he was forcefully speaking out against war in Iraq—are deserting him. In fact, the Internet might account for Dean's staying power.Discuss Dean.com Mena's Buttons ROTFLMAO! Somebody called Ben and Mena something like "oddly synthetic" - that's nuts. This link alone proves that Mena Trott is a demented HUMAN being. [Linky dinky] Sunday, May 25, 2003 Voting Machines and Paper Trails Congressman Rush Holt has introduced The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 in response to a growing concern that voting machines can be manipulated to produce bogus numbers. The machines currently produce no audit trail, which means that there's no way to verify accuracy or "demand a recount." [Link] Last October, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), groundbreaking election reform legislation that is currently helping states throughout the country replace antiquated and unreliable punch card and butterfly ballot voting systems. HAVA, however, is having an unintended consequence. It is fueling a rush by states and localities to purchase computer-voting systems that suffer from a serious flaw; voters and election officials have no way of knowing whether the computers are counting votes properly. Hundreds of nationally renowned computer scientists, including internationally renowned expert David Dill of Stanford University, consider a voter-verified paper trial to be a critical safeguard for the accuracy, integrity and security of computer-assisted elections.Discuss Voting Machines and Paper Trails Saturday, May 24, 2003 BumperActive!  Thursday, May 22, 2003 Printwash  I recently blogged about Doc Searls' insight - that some news is hidden from Google because it's archived, tucked away where Google's spiders can't find it. Doc blogged more on the subject last Tuesday, with numerous links, including several to other bloggers' comments and Microdoc News' Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story, which includes a cool diagram of a story's progress through the blogosphere. From Microdoc News: Perhaps the last conclusions we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared. In total, Microdoc News believes blogging to be a radically different world than that of mainstream media. Discuss Doc Searls: News Hidden from Google War Profiteers Card Deck  Feel like playing poker? Here's a whole nother deck of cards: the "Know Your War Profiteers Card Deck" has photos of major stakeholders in the global warfare agenda, with clear descriptions of their interests. You're just a few poker parties away from transformed political consciousness! [Link]
(From the press release :) Almost identical in appearance to the Pentagon's deck, each card contains short, often humorous, exposés designed to, "shine the light of public scrutiny onto the individuals and institutions that are reaping obscene profits by cultivating a climate of perpetual war" according to John Sellers of the Oakland CA based Ruckus Society, which sponsored the project. While poking fun at some of the most powerful people in the United States, the cards are all factual, including references to specific corporations and their past dealings with dictators and repressive regimes.Discuss War Profiteers Card Deck Tuesday, May 20, 2003 Doc Searls: News Hidden from Google Doc Searls made a great point in an item he blogged last Friday, responding to journalists like Orlowski who complain that "real" news sources don't appear on Google searches because they're obscured by weblog links that turn up in the searches. Doc notes the real reason for this: professional news sources "hide" articles in pay-for-view archives that aren't accessible to Google's spiders. Thanks, Doc! [Link] Now here's the problem: Most of these newspaper stories (the majority on the Breaking News list) are going to dissappear after seven or thirty days, relegated to for-pay archives. I am told, though I don't know (maybe some of you can tell me) that even the current and exposed archives of many print news stories are out-of-bounds for search engine bots, so they never get crawled and hence don't show up in Google and other search engine listings. Recent stories from newspapers do seem curiously absent from Google listings. (Let's gang up and do some research.)Discuss Doc Searls: News Hidden from Google Saturday, May 17, 2003 BookBlog: Public discourse, privatized Adina Levin just blogged insightful comments about the scaling problem of democracy and the necessity for the mediation of public will. [Link] The "lobby-and-market" approach isn't just an elitist power-grab by special-interests. It's a practical response to a scaling problem. Representative democracy is an solution to the problem of aggregating decision-making power. The "lobbying and marketing" strategy is a solution to aggregating the power to influence decisions. The Sierra Club and the NRA can get hundreds of thousands of people to donate, vote, and contact representatives.Discuss BookBlog:Public discourse, privatized Let's pay Canada a visit! David Isenberg sent this link to an article in The Toronto Star based on findings documented in a new book, Fire and Ice by Michael Adams. Adams conducted polls indicating vast differences between Canadians and Americans. Americans are credulous, value conformity, and are building a society based on exclusion, he says, while Canadians value individuality, personal fulfilment and quality of life. [Link] For instance, 47 per cent of Canadians polled in 2000 said they discussed local issues with friends and neighbours. That compares with 34 per cent of Americans who take an interest in neighbourhood problems. And that number plunged from 66 per cent in 1992.Discuss Let's pay Canada a visit! David Weinberger on O'Reilly on Radio David Weinberger posted a link to his brief report on the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference - a good, concise overview. He also makes a point about social software - that the the social software tools are light and modular, not bloated one-size-fits-all. (I wrote elsewhere that they're "open sourcish".) [Link] Friday, May 16, 2003 The Internet is Dying? Andrew Orlowski is at it again. Remember the Clay Shirky cult at the Emerging Technology Conference? Now he's writing about the Larry Lessig cult ("a law professor with a cult following amongst technophiles"), though in this case he appears to agree with the cult leader's contention that the Internet is dying. Lessig says this is because "the content layer, the logical layer, and the physical layer are all effectively owned by a handful of companies," but Orlowski attributes it more to spam, which includes "the Web equivalent of TV static" on Google. There's a few straw men on board, too, like Orlowski's contention that a "'freedom' lobby" derides the cellphone because it's regulated spectrum and not an open network. I thought I was standing in the freedom lobby, but I've never derided cellphones - if I believe in open networks for some purposes, that's not to say I don't expect to see proprietary networks used effectively for other purposes. I just can't seem to agree about anything Orlowski says, though I'm trying, I swear. For instance, he says Email is all but unusable because of spam. Spam is a pain in the ass, sure, but everybody I know is dealing with it. I communicate effectively with hundreds of people via email, it's my most-used tool, and probably the most effective. But Orlowski says "email has been a disaster." He also contends that Google is ruined by "a tiny number of webloggers and list-makers whose mindless hyperlinks degrade the value of its search results," yet I'm using Google effectively for all kinds of research every day. In fact, the weblogger links are pointing me to more and better results. The best I can figure is that Orlowski has a chip on his shoulder, probably needs a long vacation. The Register Thursday, May 15, 2003 Social Software I respect Chip Rosenthal, and having read his comments about social software (probably based on his perusal of the Social Software Alliance email list), I find myself reconsidering what's going down in with the social software meme. I think it's a good label, better than labels we used before, and I think it's good that blogs are becoming conversational. But my hype sensors are beginning to clang, and the Social Software Allliance seems pretty disorganized so far. In my own practice I focus more on the social than the software, and I'm thinking the potential for new tools and standards in this realm may be limited. It's certainly not a sector that's likely to be lucrative. Big, but not lucrative. What do you think? Austin's Wireless Future I'm working with Austin's IC² on "Austin's Wireless Future," a project focusing on the local economic impact of wireless telecommunications technology. There are several wireless companies in Austin (services and devices), and an increasing number of local hot spots. The project will deliver a report detailing what we need to do for Austin's wireless industry to thrive (and possibly become a hub of the industry). A report won't get us there, but the work we do will bring focus to the industry, and we'll be working on an action plan, as well, and a national conference based on our findings. If you want to lend your support to the effort, send email to my IC² address, jon at icc.utexas.edu. We're working with Professor Ted Rappaport and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group within the University of Texas. Ours is the economic and cultural complement to their technical research and development. This is just one of several economic development initiatives via IC². Other efforts focus on clean energy, games and digial media, and technology commercialization. Perspectives on spectrum allocation Cory Doctorow's posted links to comments on an FCC proposal to allow some unused TV spectrum to be used by WiFi-like devices. "It's a pretty cool idea," he says. "The spectrum is supposed to belong to the public, so let's find all the nooks and crannies of spectrum that are sitting idle, providing no benefit to anyone, and give them to the public for wireless data use." [Link] Saint Dymphna I've just lit a candle for Saint Dymphna, patron saint of the insane. Today's her day. Monday, May 12, 2003 Losing your voice I recall reading Chairman Mao's advice some years ago - that the way to rule people effectively is to keep their bellies full and their minds empty. This anti-democratic sentiment is still hanging in the air, it seems, as media conglomerates scrub the news clean of diverse ideas and ensure that we don't have to think too much about silly stuff like diverse perspectives on world affairs or who stands to gain from various political decisions. Ignorance is bliss, no? The FCC gets the point: all those rules limiting media ownership are not only anti-business, they tend to allow people with weird ideas - Democrats, for instance - to confuse us with their thinking. So the FCC is thinking about fixing the problem, so that Rupert Murdoch can just buy it all if he wants to. How simple (and lucrative!) the world would be if we got our news from one source. Like Fox, where all the news is fair and balanced... [Link] Sens. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said eased ownership restrictions will leave a few giant media companies in control of what people see, read and hear.Discuss Losing your voice "Social climbers" I've seen several pointers to this article in the Guardian Unlimited. It's a good overview of the "social software" movement (if movement's the right word). Though the social software discussions have been weblog-related, the author of this article thinks instant messaging is the more likely platform for social software of the future. I'm thinking neither and both. To me social software's real strength will be in blending tools and approaches, as with happenings... and I heard Tim O'Reilly say over lunch at the Emerging Technology conference that the Internet is becoming an operating system, from which many types and aggregates of applications will emerge. [Link] One reason is that there is a web-based platform emerging, based on weblogs, Wikis (web pages that any user can edit), and RSS feeds (either Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication - a way of sending messages when a site's contents are updated). Another is ease of use: "ridiculously easy group-forming is really new," says Shirky. A third is ubiq uity. In some cases, he argues, all the people in a group will have web access, so they can take its use for granted.Discuss "Social climbers" Thursday, May 08, 2003 Definition of social software... Tom Coates has posted a working definition of social software, and Howard Rheingold responded with historical context. I added a brief comment about what seems to have changed in moving from virtual community to social software. [Link] Salam Pax returns Salam Pax is back, blogging postwar Iraq. If he wasn't real (and I think he is), we'd have to invent him. (Thanks, Joi!) [Link] Things are looking kind of OK, these days. Life has a way of moving on. Your senses are numbed, things stop shocking you. If there is one thing you should believe in, it is that life will find a way to push on, humans are adaptable, that is the only way to explain how such a foolish species has kept itself on this planet without wiping itself out. Humans are very adaptable, physically and emotionally.Discuss Salam Pax returns Wednesday, May 07, 2003 Trackback at Amazon? I was rushing through the crowd at the Emerging Technology conference when I noticed Mena Trott talking to Jeff Bezos, and I made a mental note to ask what this was about, but never got the chance. Mena blogged it, though: I made sure to throw my usual self-effacing demeanor out the window and pitch the idea of TrackBack-enabling Amazon's Reviews to work with tools that support the protocol. He seemed interested and even amenable to the idea and Tim O'Reilly encouraged me to blog this conversation.Cool idea, hope Amazon goes for it. Send your cards and letters etc. [Link] Tuesday, May 06, 2003 Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation I blogged notes on Alan Kay's presentation at Emerging Technology here, but Lisa Rein has a much cleaner set of notes, plus a video of Kay's presentation. [Link] Alan explains what his talk is going to be about: "...a little bit of complaining about where we are and what hasn't happened, pay tribute to a few things that were done a long time ago...(and) show you some ideas about how to make things better.." He also says that hopes to get the audience interested in Squeak so that he can enlist them in the project and that he will be previewing some alpha software at the end of his talk that he's really excited about.Discuss Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation Sunday, May 04, 2003 Rebecca Blood It's my privilege to interview Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook in the Inkwell.vue conference on The WELL. Rebecca's web site is Rebecca's Pocket, part weblog and part portal. You could spend daze there, surfing the Rebecca web). Every blogger should have a case or two of Rebecca's book to hand to those people who return blank stares when the subject of weblogs comes up. [Linked] At this point I think the most useful definition for a weblog is by format: a frequently updated webpage with entries arranged in reverse chronological order. I've seen people try to expand that definition to include almost any webpage--and writers and one radio commentator who have claimed that they've been "blogging" in offline venues for years. To expand the definition in any of those directions makes the definition of "blog" broad to the point of ridiculousness.Discuss Rebecca Blood the World as a Blog A cool tool: a map of the world that shows the location of blogs as they're posted. It stops after a few, but it's still a cool concept. [Link] Saturday, May 03, 2003 Wikis I find myself using wikis more and more for collaborative work. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for "quick"; in this case used for a barely-formatted web page that anyone with access can edit. Some wikis are completely open, others password-protected. Dave Mattison's "Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars" is a good overview with quite a few links to wikis and wiki info. I set up a wiki as a possible extension of the blog. It's open, feel free to try it out. I've been using wikis for various projects; they make a good collaborative workspace, sort of like a text whiteboard. Discuss Wikis  |
interviews Interview with David Weinberger for SXSW Interactive Conference's Tech Report Discussion with Bruce Sterling at The WELL, January 3 - 17, 2003. Jon L. interview for South by Southwest Interactive conference's Tech Report. Jon L. interviewed by Adam Powell (5/13/2002) jonl interviewed by R. U. Sirius (A version of this interview appeared in The Austin Chronicle) Conversation with Bruce Sterling at the WELL's Inkwell.vue Forum Interview with R.U. Sirius at CTHEORY interview conducted by Yoshihiro Kaneda in conjunction with the publication in Japan, in the book CyberRevolution, the essay "Inforeal." interview with Allucquere Rosanne Stone. No Stone Untenured: May '98 Interview with Sandy Stone Bruce Sterling interview for bOING bOING #9 The Tedium is the Message, Assholes: Interview (for AltX) with R.U. Sirius and St. Jude Don't Believe the Hype (Austin Digerati Roundtable published January 28) Why We Listen to What They Say: Interview with Doug Rushkoff Interviews with Projecting the 21st Century: An Interview with Gary Chapman Information Junkie, an interview with Reva Basch (Researching Online for Dummies) Wired to Virtual Reality: Interview with Howard Rheingold Interview with Carla Sinclair, author of Signal to Noise Making Movies on Cyber Location: an interview with director Doug Block (Austin Chronicle, February 1998) Untangling the Web: interview with Gene Crick of MAIN and Sue Beckwith of Austin Freenet reviews Review of Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish, in Whole Earth Magazine. review in HotWired of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Cyber Top Ten for 1997 (Austin Chronicle, December 1997) essays
What Happened to the Cyber Revolution? A Few Points about Online Activism in the March '99 issue of the UK journal Cybersociology ZapSpace, published as A Fistful of DOS in the Australian magazine 21C The Cyborganic Path from the April '97 issue of CMC Magazine Essay: Are We a Nation? We Are Devo in The Ethical Spectacle. articles Little Nemo in Slumberland (bOING bOING, February 1998) Technopolitics, a 1997 essay on cyberactivism originally appearing in the Australian magazine 21C. Your 15 Minutes Are Up, Mr. Gates!1998 Top Nine List from the Austin Chronicle! Dungeons and Draggin's: a look at the Ultima Online phenomenon "We Do Cool Things": a profile of Austin's George Sanger, aka The Fatman, and Team Fat The Opera Ain't Over 'til the Cyber Lady Sings: Honoria in Ciberspazio (Austin Chronicle, November 1997) Shout Spamalam! The Austin Spam Suit Who Are You? Who Owns You? A consideration of Amazon's privacy policy. Amicus Brief filed with Supreme Court regarding the "Communications Decency Act" 11.25.96 Freewheelin' in Austin 1.7.97 Cyberdawgs and CyberRights: EFF-Austin 2.25.97 VR in 3Space: Brian Park 1.28.97 Going Native in Cyberspace: Bob Anderson 3.25.97 A Parisian Spring in Austin: Joseph Rowe and Catherine Braslavsky 4.22.97 On a Rock and Roll Firetruck: Shawn Phillips  |
