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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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Monday, June 30, 2003
The Mystery of Spam I just don't get it. Why do spammers think I'll buy from them when they use misleading headers to get me to open their messages? Don't they understand that I'll be irritated? Or more likely, that their attempt to cloak the message is so transparent that I'll delete it unread? I got a half dozen of the same penis enlargement message today, each with a different sender listed, and each with a different subject (intended to be provocative). Of course I deleted them, but I wonder - is there some guy somewhere who will actually buy this or any spam-driven product, given the sleaze quotient of irritation factor of the sales pitch? I also wonder about the penis enlargement products. I don't recall ever having seen a penis enlargement ad before email spam came along. Why are these ads so common in cyberspace? Is somebody responding? (These ads remind me of an ad I once saw for "spanish fly." The ad exclaimed in huge letters ... "Genuine Placebo!" ) Social Software Insititute? Several excellent coders are applying themselves to the creation and refinement of open source and proprietary software that supports group-forming, social network development and analysis, communication, aggregation of ideas...what we call social software, which is kind of a buzzterm, but it works. There are so many projects in development that I personally can't keep track of 'em all, which is fine as far as I'm concerned — but I do think that somebody or some group should be looking at the social software phenomenon from a high level. Programmers get into their coding at a very detail heads-down level, and can miss issues that would be more obvious if end-user practitioners were involved. In a project-for-hire you can get this perspective from customers via project managers, and some of the more successful open source projects have worked because someone or some group would fulfill that role. I think it's harder to get that perspective for social software, where many groups are working on chunks that will hopefully, best case, be interoperable and give users an opportunity to bring components together to build social environments according to their vision and preference. When the Social Software Alliance was formed, I advocated creating two separate conversations, one for coders and one for user-practitioners. We didn't do that, and I get the sense that the practitioners have dropped out of the conversation. The email list for the alliance is pretty much inactive at this point, and though some members are posting to the alliance wiki, we don't have the kind of high-level coordination of projects or at least some kind of semi-scholarly organization of information — who's doing what and how it might fit together. We also don't seem to have a broad perspective on the kinds of standards conversations that were supposed to be part of the alliance's purview. So I'm renewing a suggestion I made early on, that practitioners and academics with interest in social software form a Social Software Institute, partly for study of the emerging social software technologies and partly to inform a process of coordination and support interoperability, if not standards. Saturday, June 28, 2003 Weinberger: Why I Care about Wolfram David Weinberger, one of the better algorithms to emerge from DNA, is blogging the Wolfram conference, starting here Many of us find it obvious that the brain is hardware running software, and thus we will be able to move the software into another medium and run it losslessly, just like we can move our copy Sim City and our saved games from one computer to another. But this seems to me to be so fundamentally wrong, for reasons I won't discuss again here. Wolfram takes the brain-as-software idea to its ultimate extension: the universe is software.Discuss Weinberger: Why I Care about Wolfram Thursday, June 26, 2003 Whole Earth Singularity Alex Steffen guest-edited the Spring 2003 issue of Whole Earth Magazine, a special issue on the subject of technological singularity. Whole Earth has been supported by various angels over the years, but in the devastation economy funds have been harder to find, so this issue's never been published. You can help: Whole Earth is soliciting contributions at their web site. [Link to Alex's blog post about the issue.] Wednesday, June 25, 2003 Public Domain Enhancement Act From Lessig via Cory: Representatives Doolittle and Lofgren plan to propose an act in Congress that will require copyright holders to renew copyrights after fifty years at the cost of $1 per work, otherwise the works will pass into the public domain. Get ready to wire (or wireless!) your congressperson! [Link] SocialText and the Angels My friends at SocialText just closed a round of angel funding. SocialText's first product was a wiki adapted for use as a tool for knowledge creation and management within the enterprise. As a consultant in the same space I'm pleased to see this development, which along with recent funding interest in Movable Type's new TypePad endeavor suggests that the business side of the social web is evolving, with increasing demand for companies like SocialText, my own company Polycot, Nancy White's Full Circle Associates, and Howard Rheingold's Rheingold Associates, all of which provide consulting and services in this space. This is also good news for the Social Software Alliance and its members. [Link to Ross Mayfield's blog post about SocialText's angel round.] Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Log Format Roadmap Sam Ruby's organizing a standard approach to weblogs that will facilitate interoperatiblity. This is a Good Thing, a social software initiative that will create an environment for many conversations and communities. [Link] Terror in Texas! I kept thinking if we'd just be quiet about it, terrorists would never realize that George W. Bush is first-generation Texan, so they might think they have a reason to attack some target in our state, though hopefully not Dripping Springs, where they're filming the latest, Disneyfied version of the story of the Alamo, or Gruene, where The Weary Boys plan a CD release party for July 4th, or Lockhart, arguably the home of the world's best barbecue. My message to terrorists: our most valuable lands are probably midpoint between Midland and El Paso, where much of our wealth is buried... in the northern part of Culberson County. You could probably capture a few square miles out there and hold it for quite a while. You might see a decent sunset or two, while you're at it. [Link] Monday, June 23, 2003 The world has different shapes for different people... ...and the shape of my world is a network map. What bugs me about systems like Friendster is that they show me how great my network must be (" You are connected to 120087 people in your Personal Network, through 29 friends."), but they only show me chunks of the network; they never show me everything at once. Even worse, they don't give me the tools I need to leverage the power of the entire network. It's like the frustration I feel when I look out at the universe - I can feel that I'm more than a speck of mud on a rock, but the five senses aren't quite enough to unlock the potential... Discuss The world has different shapes for different people... Saturday, June 21, 2003 Fun with Franks  Hot dawg fanatics, be creative! Try the Octodog Frankfurter Converter, and when you've mastered that, step up to hot dog fun figures! A great distraction from the ongoing decline and fall of civilization. Thursday, June 19, 2003 Baghdad Indymedia Iraq has an Indymedia site, aka Al MuaJaha, "The Iraqi Witness." [Link] Tuesday, June 17, 2003 The Social Web BusinessWeek Online has published (June 10) a Technology Special Report on "The Social Web," including a piece about weblogs. I know, I keep blogging about blogging. Whatcha going to do in a world gone meta? [Link] Thursday, June 12, 2003 Weblogs and Democracy From Samizdata (thanks to Kevin Marks for the pointer): are blogs democratic? I think Perry de Havilland misses the point, though he posts a serviceable definition via Wikipedia (A democracy is a form of government in which the people, either directly or indirectly, take part in governing. The word democracy originates from Greek, and means rule of the people.) Having posted this, Perry goes on to assume that take part in governing means that people merely vote, as in a representative democracy, where a majority selects someone to make laws and policy by which all are governed. This all-too-common assumption actually undermines democracy, because it assumes that the people defer power to their representatives, and are more or less helpless to have an effect beyond voting. I have more to say about this than time would permit, so forgive me if I seem rushed. If you assume your only responsibility as a citizen is to cast a vote (which may seem meaningless, if "your" candidate loses), then you've already deferred much of your power to entitites that would seem beyond your reach, because you have chosen not to reach them. A citizen can do much more than vote, and you can work outside the limits of your partisan preference. I personally avoid adherence to poliltical parties and ideological arguments, because those tend to be fog in which the real intentions and processes of the policy machine are hidden. Be independent and focus on what feels fair and just and best for everyone, and before long you begin to cut the fog a bit. You begin to see that political parties exist to further their own ends. They do their best to convince their constituents that they have loftier goals, but don't believe it. Also remember that once a representative at any level is elected to office, their responsibility extends across party lines. Next point: a vote is the tip of an iceberg the real substance of which is the discussion and debate that precedes the vote. Blogs and media and all other means of publishing and communication can work as varioius platforms for the debate, and that is an inherent part of the democratic process - therefore one can effectively argue the role of blogs in a democracy. To the extent that you feed the process of collective thought that precedes collective decision, you are taking more of the power that all citizens can and should acknowledge and exercise. Do that, and visit representatives, write letters, send faxes, do emails - when you communicate, you'll have some influence. You won't always win, or your wins might be partial, but that's an aspect of collective process. Ideology doesn't serve well partly because it creates such a strong sense of right that compromise feels like failure, but it's not. Compromise is inherent in collective decision-making, and it's an important and necessary part of democratic process. So... are blogs democratic? Well, yeah - more people have more of a voice, and we're finding that weblogs and other types of social software facilitate group-forming and collaborative work, and those can feed democracy, too. However there are barriers: bloggers have skills that many lack. They can write, and they have a will to publish, which means they're not shy about sharing their ideas with god and everybody. They can type well enough to get their ideas into text. They have access to computers, and understand how to use them. So bloggers are a select group, probably not representative of the world-at-large. But blogs move us in an interesting direction, and if through blogging we participate more in political process (which Perry calls "coercive," which is the libertarian perception of all attempts to govern), then perhaps we're onto something. Might take a generation to be workable, though - computer skills will be more pervasive because everyone will have grown up with computers in schools and all 'round. Tuesday, June 10, 2003 Found  I spent some time yesterday surfing through Found Magazine, an online collection of found objects. It's a great bit of cultural anthropology. One Spicy Meatball Meatball Wiki has some thoughts about the GodKing concept and voting as Good or Evil that are worth reading and, though focused on computer mediated social systems, are applicable to politics-in-general, I think. More about Politics The following is a revision of my response in the discussion appended to the last blog item posted. I thought I should post it here, too, as a follow-up. I was reading Rise and Fall of the Third Reich last night and found, in Shirer's intro, this statement: "Adoph Hitler is probably the last of the great adenturer-conquerors....the curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb...." What struck me then was the real comparison (of the New American Century) with Hitler's Nazi party, which is in a drive for domination based on a perception that they were right for the world. World domination, for them, was destiny. Bush is no Hitler, but he doesn't have to be. And in this I'm agreeing with Dana, when he says Today we face nothing less than the Germans faced in the 1930s... In many ways Bush and the New American Century guys are not like the Nazis, so that comparison might seem odious to some - but in one essential way they are like the Nazis, they have that arrogance, that assumption that they are right for the world, and if the world chooses otherwise (as in the 2000 elections), that is the world's mistake. (I mentioned this post to my wife, and she wondered about my assumption that Bush and friends are driven by this elitist sense of the superiority of their intentions, or by mere greed. I think we're mistaken if we assume the latter. If they were mere crooks, if they were merely unprincipled, they would not present the same problem. However they are proponents of an anti-democratic ideology, and they are propelled by an ideological force to be reckoned with. If we oppose them on the basis that they're representatives of the greedy rich, and nothing more, we will lose.) Last night I saw a report on the Dean rally where they emphasized how Dean is using the Internet to establish grassroots support, and it sounded quite like the notes I sent to Jock Gill when he first met with the Dean people. That was good to hear. I have to stress, though, that the real importance of nodal politics is not in successful support for specific candidates, but in the successful construction of a more democratic model, with increased participation and increased understanding of the process and the issues. We get there by building a network, many connections and many nodes, and distributing quality information over that network, ensuring that there is at every node someone who can facilitate understanding of the messages we're distributing. The Meetups are not enough if we don't find a way to network those organizations effectively and if we don't reach into communities not served by Meetup. I suppose if I have an issue with the Dean campaign, it's because I don't think they're doing enough. We should be cultivating leaders and giving them talking points, and the understanding that works behind the talking points, so that they can build a following that asks the right questions, and asks those questions because they understand why the questions are important. I'm afraid that presidential politics is too targeted on the specific end to see the value of the means. Let the Dean people prove that I'm wrong about that... I'd like to see them expand to a more sophisticated use of "nodal politics." I can support that in a big way. Monday, June 09, 2003 Politics I offered to do some nodal politics noodling for the Howard Dean campaign, and was set to go to a Howard Dean rally tonight in Austin, but it's getting late and I've been working away, and thinking while working... Every winning presidential candidate I've supported has been a huge disappointment. It occurs to me that we waste time on presidential politics, which is disgustingly partisan and horribly unsatisfying. If we want to commit some part of our busy lives to politics, it would be worthwhile to focus on issues that matter to us, and to avoid the partisan split, instead working with both parties to achieve our aims. In other words, it's not the guy who's running for president who's going to fix the problems I care about... rather, it's up to me. He's a politician, after all, and his first duty is to sustain his win. I'm putting my time into my own life, not someone else's victory. Saturday, June 07, 2003 Big Matrix ! Matrix Reloaded is getting an IMAX release this weekend. (The IMAX version is playing at these theatres. [Link] RealityCarnival Clifford Pickover is a prolific explorer of reality's edges. His RealityCarnival site is rich with links to mind-stretching web pages, like LowLife, which has a set of tools for manipulating artificial creatures. [Link] Tuesday, June 03, 2003 Reclaim the Public Domain "We, the undersigned, while believing in the importance of copyright, also believe in the importance of the public domain. We believe the public domain is crucial to the spread of knowledge and culture, and crucial in assuring access to our past. We therefore write to petition you to reconsider major changes that you have made to the copyright system. These changes unnecessarily threaten the public domain without any corresponding benefit to copyright holders...." [Link to Petition] Monday, June 02, 2003 Ask a blogger! John Naughton of the Guardian is the anti-Orlowski. Naughton says he'd rather get his information from knowledgeable bloggers than journalists. [Link] In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.Discuss Ask a blogger! Sunday, June 01, 2003 The Creative Commons License isn't great for blogs... Chip notes that the Creative Commons license can create a legal liability for bloggers, as noted in this post by Dan Bricklin. Also note the next post at SATN by David Reed: If someone were to repeat any of my ideas, anywhere (for example, the "end-to-end argument") they would be infringing my copyright in that expression, and probably my trademark. If you were to want to build on that idea, or criticize it, you'd have to find a different way of expressing it. And of course, if the different expression cites my work, a mere rewording shows that you almost certainly derived the new expression as a translation, which is a copy, so it may indeed be insufficient (because translation is protected by copyright, as well) to protect yourself from my suing you.Discuss The Creative Commons License isn't great for blogs...  |
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  |
