Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 145 of 147)

Gil, Byrne, Commons

The new news is that Wired will be releasing an unrestricted CD at the concert (amusingly enough, the article in the WSJ will be restricted soon so I’ll find another link). Gilberto Gil, David Byrne, Town Hall and Creative Commons all have sites for your information and your pleasure.

Remember:
The event will be Webcast LIVE 8-11 p.m. EDT September 21 via a custom- skinned QuickTime player featuring live audio streamed in high-quality MPEG4/AAC audio, along with a slideshow of photos that will be shot and published via the player as the event occurs. QuickTime player will be available on www.creativecommons.org starting Wednesday, September 15.

Wired magazine’s "Rip. Sample. Mash. Share." compilation CD invites
listeners to copy, remix and sample these songs and others at will:

ARTIST SONG
Beastie Boys ‘Now Get Busy’
David Byrne ‘My Fair Lady’
Zap Mama ‘Wadidyusay?’
My Morning Jacket ‘One Big Holiday’
Spoon ‘Revenge!’
Gilberto Gil ‘Oslodum’
Dan the Automator ‘Relaxation Spa Treatment’
Le Tigre ‘Fake French’
Paul Westerberg ‘Looking Up in Heaven’
Cornelius ‘Wataridori 2’
Matmos ‘Action at a Distance’
Source: Wired

WXYC – 10 years on the Net approaching

I’ve been having a great time going back to the email from 10 years back when we plotted to put WXYC on the net 7/24. Mike Shoffner and David McConville did all the work with help from Jonathan Magid and Chris Columb, but I got to be involved too. The biggest problem wasn’t the technologies available — we knew what we had sucked but were willing to try anyway (CUSeeMe the new product is probably better but we’re talking low low bandwidth in those days) — but that we were stiffled for a few months by legal concerns. No one had ever done a constant simultaneous net.cast of a radio station so no one knew what libilities we might enounter. In fact, the guy who was most experienced, Internet Talk Radio’s Carl Malamud, told us that it wasn’t possible to do what we wanted to do legally. Luckily David was not convinced and found that college stations could put a signal on a wire — this was the famous carrier current radio that college stations without antennae used in the 60s.
Then we hit the IETF streaming folks, like Brad Templeton who didn’t find it rec.funny at all, (more on this later and I hope to get some snips from old emails up too.)

My favorite artifact is this recording of a Swiss radio station trying to listen to WXYC in early 1995.

Blogger at the National Newspaper Association

My beloved wife, Sally Greene, is in Denver blogging about the National Newspaper Association meeting there. She has discovered ethernet connections in the hotel and discovered that community papers don’t care for bloggers anymore than they like buggers. News flash: they can’t see a profit in blogging or even putting information on the web.
The most important part of the entire Convention is this: my mother-in-law and Gilmer Mirror publisher Sarah L. Greene will receive the Emma C. McKinney Award.

West in Wired; McGuinn in Christianity Today

Two of ibiblio’s most popular contributors got some great press in the past couple of days.

librarian.net
‘s Jessamyn West was written up in Wired in an article called “Don’t Mess With Librarians “. Since at least 1993 when Jessamyn began putting the rarin’ back in librarian, we knew not to mess with them.

Roger McGuinn, whose FolkDen project is approaching its tenth year, was the subject of a very nice interview in Christianity Today called “No Ordinary Folk”.
Roger is also the subject of an interview by the Creative Commons folks now posted on their site along with another interview with DJ Spooky

Commons, Gilberto Gil and David Byrne

I’ll be very briefly in NYC on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning (9/21-22) for the Wired sponsored Creative Commons Benefit featuring David Byrne and Gilberto Gil.
I’ll be staying at the uberhip W Hotel with the Commoners and I’ll have a little side trip to Conde Nast (publisher of Wired) and perhaps up to Time, Inc.
With luck, I’ll hook up with ibiblio alumni and friends whilst up there. The big question is can I dress hip enough to be allowed to stay in W. Is black still in in NYC?

The Concert will be webcast LIVE at 8pm EDT Tuesday September 21.
So if you can’t get to NYC, you can still see the show.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day – 9/19

International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Avast, mateys! International Talk Like a Pirate Day sits on the horizon like a drunken parrot. Awk! Arrg! Thar she be lessen a fortnight away! Sunday September 19!

Prepare with these great ibiblio resources these songs, this book, this book, and The Queen of Pirate Island and this ship.

And check out this great Blackbeard site.

Bones in the Paris Catacomb Photo from the Catacombs of Paris (WebMuseum) by Craig A. Merriman.

And use this non-ibiblio resource for your typing (thanks to Greg Cox).

Mentioned in class today

John Perry Barlow: His blog, his Homestead at EFF, his recent Reason interview, his famous Declaration of Cyberspace Independence (1996), some Barlow lyrics (mostly recorded by Grateful Dead).

The Well today at Salon.

Howard Rheingold’s HotWired (today’s not anything like the HR version), then Electric Minds, thenBrainstorm Community.

Robert Putnam, Ray Oldenberg, Ronald Burt, Marc Granovetter, Walt Disney and others are listed our readings section.

Annotating Rheingold’s Virtual Communities

I’ve always thought it interesting that back-to-the-earth hippies ran Howard’s beloved Well, so I usually include links to the Farm Community, the Farm (is there a difference?), some of its history, and a bit about the founder, Stephen Gaskin.

Then again we have the engineers and bureaucrats who were critical to the growth of the Internet in particularJ. C. R. Licklider and others.

The National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine has one of the best history of the net sites — beginning of course with the telegraph.

I have to point out that despite a 10 year opportunity to correct errors, Howard didn’t creditCommunity
(Gemeinschaft) and Society (Gesellschaft) to Tonnies (he says Durkheim for some reason)
.

Tempora Heroica has been supporting MUDding for over 10 years and still is going strong. There is a history there to be written for sure.

Before we get all excited about William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, let’s remember Vernor
Vinge’s True Names
is really The first cyberpunk/cyberspace story. It
has obvious and predictive links to MUDs, IRC and virtual worlds.

Google vs the Second Law

I was teaching during the panel yesterday that was called “Is Google Good” — I swear I read it as “Is Google God?” so did Justin Watt when he posted to the attendees.

This reminded me that when I was at FOO Camp this past weekend with several Google and Gmail folks. Candidly one recalled the two Google corporate commandments: Don’t Be Evil and Don’t Suck. Now that Google is a publicly held company (sorta I think the founders and friends are still the majority by far), the Googlist wondered just how long they could continue without sucking — 6 months, 6 years, 60 years? Of course, he was hoping for the 60 years, but opined that all companies will eventually suck.

Talk turned to times when Apple (whose folks were also in attendance including some serious ex-Applers) did and did not suck.

Is there a meantime to sucking measure (M2S) once a company goes public?

I refer you to the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Muller and Dauber

Today, we had two UNC faculty members, who have become public intellectuals via blogging or at least noticed beyond their specialities and this school, visit our class. The idea here is to see how knowledge capital and social capital can be expressed in the blogosphere by very different folks doing different kinds of work (intellectual work but yes work too). We were also hoping for and got interesting personal stories and opinions. Opinions for bloggers! I’m shocked! One thing to notice immediately is how passionately both feel about their writing and their engagement with the blogosphere.

Cori Dauber’s blog, Ranting Profs, is aimed at ‘media coverage in the war on terror’

Eric Muller’s blog, Is That Legal?, started out as random musings of a law professor — not necessarily about legal matters — but recently has been taken over by his research area — Japanese Interment in WWII — after a more than just lively run in with author Michelle Maklin.

Both have drawn on their readers for more information (knowledge capital) and support and references and other outlets for their work (social capital).

last night of FOO

Spent some time having Jim Lussier of Norwest Venture partners show me the legal music sharing/personal radio project, Mercora, that he’s involved in. Nice community feel that I wish iTunes had. You can see what’s playing where, see profiles of members, see their playlists, listen in, chat and/or email and/or blog about the music and with members. Even pays SoundExchange as the RIAA requires.

Then dropped into a presentation of Engineering Biology which ended with a discussion of the Library of Science and of licensing DNA technologies by Drew Endy of MIT Biology. Very powerful arguments presented about releasing biology for patents and from publishing restrictions. Ended up wondering if DNA research or protein research is more to the point for immuniology. True proteology is way behind DNA research now but moving from DNA to the proteins that DNA might make makes sense to me.

2 am EDT and I’m fried. Bed time for East Coasters. Tomorrow out of here by 8 am PDT

LOAF – social networking via email?

List of All Friends according to Slashdot is:

an extension to email that lets you send out address book data without compromising your privacy. LOAF appends a hash-like data structure to each outgoing email, and collects similar attachments from the people who write to you. These files can be queried to see if they contain a given email address, but they can’t be reverse-engineered to reveal the list of addresses used to construct them. LOAF lets you check whether someone emailing you for the first time is a complete stranger, or appears in the address books of some of your trusted correspondents. And as a decentralized application, LOAF offers an interesting alternative to current social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster.

The idea is to share your contacts with your friends via a hash of your addressbook. The hash uses Bloom filters. In fact, the social networking aspect is less networking than sharing who you trust as having sent you email that you’d like to read. You don’t have to network socially to do this really; it’s more about getting rid of spam. no central server so that’s nice. procmail can filter on incoming. but outgoing using pine, you fake sendmail to do the hash attachment.

Make: the Mook/Bagazine

Dale Daugherty says the aim of Make is to address the home shop and hacks on grey market etc.

Andrew shows off gameboy advanced hacks by using a linker (which you must buy overseas at 100 -150$) but he wants to talk about creating one yourself. He’s after not illegal behavior but emulation for classic games including superniteendo and sinclair etc. even infocom games like Zork.also donkey kong.
You can electronically tune your car with this even. Much excitement over using GBA for that.

How to make almost anything and not kill yourself
– Raffi Krikorian (at MIT) is the TA there. MIT returns to its roots. oddities discussed including scream delayer.

Open Source car and/or source forge for hardware desired. (MIT folks excited about this).

Tom Anderson shows off a tube amp for guitars. It is loud and makes noise so it’s a success.

Pages from Make circulate. Ariel Photography from Kites. cheap lightings tricks.
Soldering and Desoldering.

James Duncan does 3D printing using chocolate as the material. Legos used to make the device.
800$ of Lego and 60$ of chocolate plus a funnel. He only used about 200$ in Legos and was tic-ed about

Saul was the Lego fellow at MIT but he somehow offended them and they will not build chocolate printer. Another fellow build a lathe that will carve candles and another to scrape toast.

A general moan and whine about the way Lego packages their products.

Is Make Popular Mechanics married to Wired?

Peter Mui is sitting beside me. He was shooting off 1 liter bottles using water and air pressure delighting all the kids here. He has a great launching pad too.

Passionate users/readers

Kathy Sierra (see earlier post) is talking about how her Java books became the best selling Java books. and their newest title in the HeadFirst series that she and Bert Bates created.
Drawing from Neurobiology (work on learning and increasing memory), game design, advertising and marketing, psycology, learning theory and entertainment, she and Bert redesigned books to add emotion (so to aid memory). How does the brain work to prevent memory? most of brain chemistry is dedicated to preventing long term memory she says. Brain wants to keep non-life threatening material out and to let life-preserving material in. long memories are from insults and other passions. straight facts fall off the skull thanks to brain chemistry.
Their books have been acused of being comix, but they are not (says I).
(speaking of emotion — lunch was various grilled wursts and salad. i remember it well)
Game designers (she holds up the book Flow and Chris Crawford’s “The Art of Interactive Design”) why do we keep on just one compile away. seeing the end very very close. a challenge with a solution close at hand keeps you at it. basically the programming zone. game designers are the masters of this. levels in games and rewards pull you along.
learning theory and cognitive overload. knowledge must be a co-creation. the learner must be engaged in building knowledge.
marketing etc. using sex? can you say learning java servelets will get you sex? no bud swedish bikini team for o’reilly books.She cites the Substance of Style. Donald Norman also on style and on emotions. lovemarks the future beyond brands. even Tom Peters has a DK book out.
A move from formal language to conversational gives a 40% improvement in performance.
elearning book – imbedding text is better than a caption. a caption is better than a textual reference.
Culting of Brands
Their book was designed with cliff hangers, incomplete information etc.
Reviewing the reviews for love. mentions of the word “love” first names used to identify or name the authors (instead of last), number of exclamation points (no greater than 2 in a row count tho), reviewers say more about themselves using “I” during the review.
Looking to create the preceived “I rule.” in the reader. not to impress the reader with how smart the authors are.
Could this be the Java version of Jacques Derrida‘s Glas for Geeks?
Her talk also made me think a bit about Vladamir Mayakovski and the wonderful museum in his honor in Moscow. And while I’m on it, McLuhan’s collage designed books like War and Peace in the Global Village.
Next book will be on design patterns due out soon.
Why’s (Poignant) guide to Ruby

Corporate blogging with Tim Bray et al

Software engineers like to blog at leasr for now, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, 6 apart, amazon, google (internal) after buying blogger, infoworld, ebay, mozilla, yahoo. all represented. as well as external personal blogs.

microsoft has strong email list tradition and are less like to go to blog (scoble). Bray says same about Sun. wikis get great talk from everyone for project groups in particular. (sun, microsoft, google says greg stein). social text does groups not blogs says ross mayfield. shift logs are good for blogs (in disney and military). when does the honeymoon period end and people drop off.

bray says public blogs are in your face more than private email. sun went from 30 blogs to 700 on opening blogs.sun.com. searching sucks says danyel fisher — except for google (greg stein agrees).

Blogs are of the moment and a public archive as opposed to email. nuggets more important that threads? if so discoverable blogs are great. importance of blogspheres gone on about. go lyceum!

policies? Sun policy: executive decision to free the masses. schwatrz (CEO) tells tim bray to lettem go til lawyers panic. will snow installed blogs.sun.com. now the lawyers want a real policy which they need to have for SEC awareness, trademark, etc. and how do you handle stupid behavior.

start the blog and start the policy about the same time or blogs will be delayed or trouble will happen (the last if no policy, the first legal delays because lawyers don’t have blog experience and fear it too much). does say steve balmer have very different liabilities from a contract programmer — of course. how to make a policy then. Yahoo says PR is worse than lawyers. PR folks want to kill bloggers who break their message. Engineers want authority by speaking to the weaknesses as well as strengths.

tale of tivo vs media center at MSFT discussed. how do bosses accept networking outside the company. corporate loyalty vs craft loyality comes right back up.

MSFT does have an internal list that watches the blogs (neighborhood watch for blogs?). keeping your blog external allows you to move with the craft rather than be held in the knowledge management tar pit? or does encouraging the open environment create loyality? MSFT says yes they got a couple of guys from APPL because Apple did not let them blog or be public. person brand (read reputation) vs corporate brand (read some). Negotiate for the right to blog. Steve Gilmore does this.

Small company is told by their PR advisors to blog and so get their message and personalities out and to help build relationship.

career limiting moves

war stories

personal vs corporate (multiple blogs)

application areas

internal or external? (why does internal suck so badly)

best practices

1) let your management know what you are doing (IBM, Sun and MSFT advise.)
2) get your peers to document best practices (Ross Mayfield) MSFT and Sun do this
3) read before you right
4) be generous with your links
5) be soft to competitors (says Scoble of MSFT) not everyone agrees. “civility is the luxury of those in power.”
6) manage disagreement and work it out internally first. don’t blindside your collegues
7) email etc have the same problems so use the discussion to create policy
8) write what you know
9) comments or not? inconclusive

individual blogs often prefered over group or team blogs. some say team/group blogs are training wheels for individual blogs. tim bray says voice is the stuff!

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