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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, October 23, 2003
Richard Florida: "Crazy people run this country" Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, speaking in Austin last night, ended his lecture with a strong note of caution about the Bush administration. Crazy people run this country, he said, and they're shutting the U.S. down, closing the borders and reviving the 50s control mentality. This is damaging in so many ways, but Florida's concern is that creative people won't come to America, and creative people in America will leave. Florida's research has shown a clear link between openness, creativity, and business innovation; his ongoing focus is on the relationship between creativity and economic growth. The message here is that there will be economic repercussions if the policies of the Bush administration are sustained much longer. All our creative people will flee, he says. We will lose what made us great. We have to struggle for the future of this country. [Link to Florida's Creative Class web site.] [Discuss] Monday, October 20, 2003 WiFi at Book People  Austin Wireless City made its latest free WiFi install at Book People today, keeping Austin weird and unwired. A whole crowd of laptop-carrying latte-slurping people showed up, hung out, and did what people usually do when they get a decent broadband Internet connection: surfed, researched, swapped emails, wrote great books, and generally had a great time. Coming up on October 23: AWC's launch party at Opal Devine's. Sunday, October 19, 2003 Shirky: File-sharing Goes Social Clay Shirky explains how RIAA attacks on the hubs of decentralized scale-free file sharing networks might favor the emergence of more social collaborative file-sharing environments. [Link] [Discuss] Most file-sharing would go on in groups from a half dozen to a few dozen -- small enough that every member can know every other member by reputation. Most file-sharing would take place in the sorts of encrypted workspaces designed for business but adapted for this sort of social activity. Some users would be members of more than one space, thus linking several cells of users. The system would be far less densely interconnected than Kazaa or Gnutella are today, but would be more tightly connected than a simple set of social cells operating in isolation. Saturday, October 18, 2003 "The Internet: Reflections on Our Present Discontents" In NetFuture, Stephen L. Talbott explores the impact of our thinking about the Internet, or perhaps our lack of the kind of thinking that puts it into the right perspective relative to our communal, social context. He argues that the supposed efficiency of the Internet should not be seen as a goal in itself, apart from our values, concluding that the Internet can be the expression of a healthy society – or society can become an unhealthy expression of the Internet. [Link] [Discuss] "...we will have so easily and casually invited young people around the world into this new activity -- and no actual community will have done anything at all of the sort that was once required to create a place, the conditions, the cultural surroundings, the human context within which the activity occurs. The young people will have been lifted out of their communities and into this new recreation, not because some sort of rooted and coherent evolution of the communities is taking place, but simply because a worldless world is now at our fingertips and someone sitting alone in front of a screen came up with a workable combination of digital bits. The levity of it all -- the ease and thoughtlessness and disconnection and vapidity and grave cultural consequence -- these are what worry me. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where a teenager, with no real sense for what he is doing, can to one degree or another reprogram every community in our society." Monday, October 13, 2003 Lawn Dots, Anyone?  Prentiss Riddle already beat me to it, but I had to post my own photo, taken this morning, of the polka-dot alwan at 29th and Glenview. Keep Austin Weird! Saturday, October 11, 2003 pixelfreak  Exceptional computer graphics created by Rene Hernandez Miranda, a 19-year-old pixel illustrator and Flash designer in San Salvador. Works include an amazing city poster and an animated house. There's also a tutorial showing how Rene works. Via Web Zen. [Link] Friday, October 10, 2003 Contribute to Stop CAPPS II Bill Scannnell has been fighting Capps II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), an intrusive "aviation security program" that may actually make flying more dangerous. Among other things, Bill discovered that JetBlue records of 5 million customers were exposed (despite statements to the contrary). Bill's been fighting the good fight, but he has to put bread on the table, too. Help Bill with your contributions. [Link] CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System) is nothing less than a Soviet-style system of internal border controls. An incredible invasion of privacy, the system is un-American and un-Constitutional: not that a pesky thing like the Bill of Rights has stopped the extremists down at Homeland Security. It is our duty as citizens to do the job that the Department of Homeland Security has miserably failed at doing: to protect the US Constitution and stop CAPPS II.Discuss Contribute to Stop CAPPS II Monday, October 06, 2003 Doing, Blogging, Wireless It occurred to me that I'm doing so much lately that my resolve to blog daily's been sinking to the bottom of the pile of tasks, so I'm strengthening my resolve and thinking how to be more effective at capturing thoughts. Meetings take time away from the multitasking environment, and meetings are a fact of life of the Wireless Future project. Several meetings today and this week, in fact, as we move from research to refinement of the report we'll deliver in November, and ramp up our planning of the March conference. We're planning three days of wireless presentations and panels, and at the same time I'm coordinating a couple of panels for SXSW Interactive – on The Aesthetics of Social Networks and Emergent Democracy. Among this week's meetings is an Austin Technology Council meeting tomorrow evening where Ted Rappaport of the UT Wireless Networking and Communications Group is speaking about the wireless telecommunications revolution (Details). We'll preview our report at the same meeting, and the new Austin Wireless Alliance (an alliance of local wireless companies) will have its first public introduction. [Discuss] Dead end? Joi Ito discovers the end of the Internet via Google. [Link] | Discuss Friday, October 03, 2003 Lisa Rein Slippin' Away Nice song by Lisa Rein (QuickTime vid). Everything seems okay. [Link] Wednesday, October 01, 2003 Jason Scott on Tom Jennings Blogging in boingboing.net's guest bar, Jason Scott includes a nice overview of Tom Jennings' work. I started to say that Tom - creator of FidoNet - is an unsung hero of network technology, but Jason's including him in a documentary about BBSes, so hopefully Tom'll get the recognition he deserves. This interview I did with Tom in 1993 is a favorite - Tom turned me on to the power of decentralized networks and nodal social networks built on the same model. This thinking is all the rage today, but Tom was already there a decade ago. [Link] For myself (and probably many others), he's "The Fidonet Guy", the fellow who created a BBS program called Fido that included a feature of sending along messages to other connected Fidos, enabling them to pass messages and e-mail between themselves. Sure, you say, Arpanet and all that, but unlike Arpanet, Jennings' program just required a modem and a PC and a phone line, and suddenly you had a personal node on the network, right there. This was the "ah hah" that brought many more people in to keep this dream going, folks who didn't have the opportunity of working on DARPA research projects or cradled in the hands of an academic institution. This was something you could pull down, crank around it, and (after some effort) be onto a functioning, real network within a very short time.Discuss Jason Scott on Tom Jennings  |
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  |
