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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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Saturday, August 30, 2003
"C2IT" Credit Card Scam I just received an email purportedly from Citibank's C2IT, a service that allows you to send money to people around the globe. The email claims that I've received $217 from someone at earthlink.net, and tells me that I just need to sign up for the service in order to claim the money. Here's the signup form at the bottom of the html email:  This is clearly a scam. No reputable credit card company would ask you to include your card number and your ATM pin in the same communication. Besides which, I never heard of the guy who wa supposedly sending me a small pile of money. Just a head's up! "Freedom's Dark Side" Inspired rant by Bruce Sterling, surveying the "Open Cultures" scene in Vienna. His conclusion sounds reminds me of Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst form of government in the world... except for all the others." In this case, it's "Capitalism is the worst economic system in the world... except for all the others." Or except for a vacuum where there's no system at all, everything is up for grabs, and freedom becomes an unmediated ongoing chaos of exploitation and submission. (My own take is to look for the balance between free software extremists and buttondown corporate hucksters... there's gotta be some kind of liberation in there somewhere. (Thanks, Cory, for the pointer.) [Link] So Europe's open source revolutionaries have a great model for fighting the power. But they rarely consider the aftermath. As the former Soviet Union sadly demonstrates, if you depose the system and don't replace it with anything, you unleash not only altruism but a host of dark traits no less human yet far more destructive.Discuss Freedom's Dark Side Republican Support for Howard Dean The neoconservative element that controls the current administration and is attempting to gain control of other aspects of governance in the U.S. is finally encountering a powerful backlash of opposition. Now traditional Republicans are beginning to speak out against their party's apparent move to the far right, and their perspective is expressed eloquently in a Greater Democracy piece written by Michael Cudahy, a staunch Republican who has worked for years on Republican campaigns. Cudahy is not changing parties, but he is supporting the Howard Dean presidential campaign. [Link] Over the last 15 years this country has witnessed the emergence of the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. During this time traditional Republicans have been deeply concerned by the serious deterioration of respect for established party principles by GOP leaders. A great party once firmly rooted in the thoughts and policies of visionary presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower has lost touch with its history.Discuss Republican Support for Howard Dean Friday, August 29, 2003 Busy! You know I'm busy when I go several days without blogging... and believe me, I saw plenty of stuff I wanted to blog, but did the responsible thing and passed, because there just wasn't time. I have several irons in the fire, but one thing that's kept me busy is a project I'm handlilng for IC² Institute, which is a think tank devoted to creativity and capitalism (the two c's) that's connected to the University of Texas at Austin. The project I'm working on, Wireless Future, is about wireless innovation and economic development. We're working on a report which we'll deliver in November, and a conference which will take place at South by Southwest Interactive next March. Oddly enough I've posted little about it here. When I stumble onto wireless links, I tend to post them at Smart Mobs or Wireless Future. If you're an entrepreneur and your focus is related somehow to wireless technology, Austin is the place to be, because the wireless companies here are pulling together and working cooperatively to make it happen. Even more interesting are the opportunitites for digital media content developers here. IC² is also cultivating that industry with a Digital Media Collaboratory... we're talking about games, interactive narrative, etc. Monday, August 25, 2003 Information Wants to Be Sold On Ebay A former Morgan Stanley VP sold his Blackberry on ebay for $15.50 after leaving the company – and forgot to wipe a virtual ton of sensitive data. There's a bit of finger-pointing in the wake of disclosure. [Link] "We trust employees with a lot of sensitive information; that's why we have these procedures in place. Someone who is in mergers and acquisitions and is a vice president should be very aware of his responsibilities," [Morgan Stanley's Diana Quintero] said.Discuss Information Wants to Be Sold On Ebay Saturday, August 23, 2003 Neil Armstrong - The Truth  Complete and unedited: Neil Armstrong's first $%@%& steps on the moon. [Link] Post a comment at blogjam. Military Watchdog Network Stefan Wray sends an update about the Southern Military Watchdog Network, a proposal endorsed by the recent Weapons Check Workshop at the Peace Farm in Amarillo. It just makes sense for citizens to keep track of military projects in or near their communities, especially those that involve weapons testing and storage of radioactive materials. The weekend kicked off Friday evening with Mavis Belisle of the Peace Farm leading a car caravan around the Pantex Plant with frequent stops to hear her describe what happens at this nuclear weapons facility. Not far from the highway, in plain view, are storage areas that contain highly radioactive bomb-grade plutonium. During the 1990s workers at Pantex were involved with decommissioning nuclear weapons, although some of their work involved modifying and refurbishing existing nukes.Discuss Military Watchdog Network Artificial Intelligence, Interactivity & Immersive Environments Spent time the Thursday and Friday at IC²'s 2nd Annual Games Development Workshop: Artificial Intelligence, Interactivity & Immersive Environments. The conference is excellent, though unfortunately I'm overcommitted and missing much of it. Thursday I showed up late in the day and ran into Bruce Sterling; we wandered into the day's last presentation on neural networks and genetic algorithms in games, a presentation by members of the University of Texas' Neural Networks Research Group, led by Professor Risto Miikkulainen. They talked about Symbiotic, Adaptive NeuroEvolution (SANE), competitive coevolution, and NeuroEvolution for Adaptive Teams of agents (NEAT). Yesterday my compadre Mark Meadows spoke, having flown in from Paris, where he's just finished a book based primarily on his trip to Baghdad in May, though at this event he was naturally talking about his work with games and his last book, Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, beginning with anecdotes about his project to capture photographically facial expressions in Paris, in response to the questions "When was your first sexual experience?" and "What sound do you make when you have an orgasm?" As an artist who, in the context of game design, must consider flow and variation of expressions, he was putting together a kind of visual taxonomy. He also described his St. Elmo project, a "talking portrait" that is a focal point in developing a platform for AI-based conversational characters.
 Discuss Artificial Intelligence, Interactivity & Immersive Environments Apple's Loss Kevin Marks is leaving Apple under circumstances that he explains in his weblog. This is Apple's loss: Kevin is diligent, imaginative, and passionate about challenging work. The key here seems to be that Apple's corporate environment was an increasingly bad fit. Joi Ito says "I think this is a great loss to Apple, but may end up being a good thing for Kevin, MediAgora and the social software space. I am obviously talking to Kevin about "his next thing" but I encourage people who are looking for partners and are interested in someone who understands streaming media, alternative music distribution theories and social software to talk to Kevin." Wednesday, August 20, 2003 Government Technology, Efficiency, and Complexity Tom Adelstein writes about creating lower costs for government applications at Linux Journal. (Thanks to Doc Searls for the pointer.) In a past life I worked for an agency, and I had a criticism of one assumption I saw in Tom's article. Here's what I emailed Tom: Tom, I'm looking at your egovernment piece, and noting this paragraph: Update: Tom confirms via email that his 50% figure was supported by research: I went with statistics from a major LAMP vendor with a track record of 525 + installations at the State, local and Federal level. I also checked with a second vendor who only builds LAMP applications and we spec'd out databases in our survey. Sunday, August 17, 2003 "Safe and sound, at last -- IRC and IM play a role" David Beckemeyer's spooky account of his 12-year-old son's flight into the middle of the blackout in New York, and how the day was saved by a patchwork of communications via chat, instant messaging, and cellphones. (Via Joi Ito's web. [Link] With the help of someone on #joiito IRC, I get a number for JFK security and manage to get through. After explaining to me that there was a power outage at the airport (thank you for that), the officer proves somewhat helpful. He takes down all the information and says to call back 15 minutes after the plane lands. He also says my niece should be able to make it into JFK by car if she comes by way of Staten Island. I have my niece on one phone and JFK security on the other.Discuss "Safe and sound, at last -- IRC and IM play a role" Tuesday, August 12, 2003 Austin's Full Moon FlashMob of August 11  EFF-Austin's outreach coordinator/mad genius David Nuñez writes about his surreal experience FlashMobbing yesterday. [Link] I heard the simultaneous SHLIIIIIK, FLIP-FLOG-CLUK of 50 umbrellas all around me opening up at the same time. i looked up and sure enough, my umbrella was wide open in its glory. I was too far back in the crowd to have seen the crosswalk signal change, but it didn't matter... we were now officially mobbing and i just had to follow the flock.Discuss Austin's Full Moon FlashMob of August 11 Mind Wide Open Steven Johnson is blogging bits of his latest book-in-progress, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain, Neuroscience, And The Search For The Self. He discusses the theme of the book here, and blogs a chunk on mind-reading here. The book is an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.Discuss Mind Wide Open Sifry's Technorati Tutorial David Sifry has blogged part 1 of a tutorial explaining the mechanics of his excellent blogosphere metatool, Technorati. [Link] Monday, August 11, 2003 James Thurber on Harold Ross I read James Thurber's The Years with Ross 35 or 40 years ago, so I don't remember much except that it was a great read and made me think twice about becoming a writer. Here's a piece of an interview where Thurber discusses Ross. You have to buy it to read the whole thing, but this hunk gives you a sense why Ross was a great editor and why people who read Thurber were a little demented in the end. [Link] It wasn't true what they often said of him—that he broke up writers like matches—but still he wasn't the man to develop a writer. He was an unread man. Well, he'd read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and several other books he told me about—medical books—and he took the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the bathroom with him. I think he was about up to H when he died. But still his effect on writers was considerable. When you first met him you couldn't believe he was the editor of The New Yorker and afterwards you couldn't believe that anyone else could have been. The main thing he was interested in was clarity. Someone once said of The New Yorker that it never contained a sentence that would puzzle an intelligent 14 year old or in any way affect her morals badly. Ross didn't like that, but nevertheless he was a purist and perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: it kept us from being sloppy. When I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant French or a foreign language. But he repeated, "Do you know English?" When I said I did he replied, "Goddamn it, nobody knows English." As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy, something that was going to throw him. He used to fuss for an hour over a comma. He'd call me in for lengthy discussions about the Thurber colon. And as for poetic license, he'd say, "Damn any license to get things wrong." In fact, Ross read so carefully that often he didn't get the sense of your story. I once said: "I wish you'd read my stories for pleasure, Ross." He replied he hadn't time for that.Discuss James Thurber on Harold Ross Mystery Ape CNN reports evidence of a "mystery ape" in the Congo, and the reports sound like descriptions of yeti and sasquatch. [Link] Easy Does It  Adam Weinroth and Easyjournal get great coverage in today's Austin American-Statesman, which ends with a quote from yours truly from a background interiew I did for the piece with the Statesman's Kirk Ladendorf. Dig the stats below - I'd like to see how those numbers compare to stats for Blogger and TypePad. [Link] Easyjournal counts 70,000 registered members and about 1.1 million visitors a month. Weinroth says traffic is growing by about 10 percent a month. Data from Alexa, an Internet-tracking firm, shows Easyjournal is the ninth-most visited site in Austin. Dell is No. 1.Discuss Easy Does It Friday, August 08, 2003 Six Degrees of Duncan Watts Duncan Watts and colleagues have completed a study that affirms the theory that everyone is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees of separation. They took over 60,000 people and asked them to find strangers using only their Internet connections. Watts et al measured an average 5-7 steps to make the connection. [Link] "The Internet is just a tool for doing this. It is all about social networks," said Duncan Watts, who led the study.Discuss Six Degrees of Duncan Watts Tuesday, August 05, 2003 Bitter Battle in the Blogosphere Religious arguments. Geeks are arguing about the standard for syndicating blog data. Dave Winer wanted the vague simplicity of the latest RSS (2.0), so he froze the code and donated the organs to the Berkman Center, being a Harvard fellow and all. Other people are playing, though, and they don't want the code frozen just yet, so they're extending as Atom (or whatever name works, ultimately). The ongoing effort to define a standard for syndication will chug along within the framework fo IETF or Social Software Alliance, mention of the latter conspicuously absent from the link I've posted here. [Link] Demand for more features in a syndication format, along with frustration at Winer's governance of RSS, inspired Ruby and others to begin work on a comprehensive alternative to Winer's format. They say their technology will define not only syndication, but publishing, editing and archiving functions as well.Discuss Bitter Battle in the Blogosphere Robert Anton Wilson: We are all "Cosmic Schmucks" The revamped, decentralized Disinfo.com features an article on Robert Anton Wilson and the July 23 gathering in Santa Cruz to premiere Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson. RAW is a "guerilla ontologist" known for his aggressively agnostic view of reality (here called "maybe logic"). [Link] Wilson's signature agnosticism and avoidance of dogma repeatedly surface throughout the movie. Using video excerpts from classic R.A.W. appearances at seminars, lectures and conventions, the filmmakers have assembled an essential primer to Bob's "maybe logic" and its basis in quantum physics and general semantics, from Schrodinger's cat paradox to the famous dilemma over whether the electron "is" a wave or a particle, inevitably passing through E-Prime and its usefulness in controlling the hallucinatory properties of language.Discuss Robert Anton Wilson: We are all "Cosmic Schmucks" Sunday, August 03, 2003 The New Censorship Cory blogs a reference to Curtis White's "The New Censorship," an essay in the lastest issue of Harper's. White notes how we no longer feel outrage at various political scandals because the reported facts are just more churn in the infotainment mediasphere. [Link]  |
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  |
