Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 22 of 146)

Second Life == Gopher of Virtual Worlds?

Eric Schonfeld interviews Phillip Rosedale of Second Life for TechCrunch asking “Will browser-based virtual worlds challenge the client-based Second Life?” Rosedale on video has no fears; SL will prevail. But commentors on the article are less sure.

For my part, I was there at the Fortune conference when Rosedale claimed from the stage that SL was simpler to operate than moving a mouse and clicking on a web page. I may have misheard, but I didn’t mis-see when I watched Vint Cerf’s jaw drop in concert with my own.

Rosedale was on stage with Joi Ito and Larry Lessig and their response to “2018: Life on the Net” was very different — a whole world apart from SL — which made the whole digression even odder and somewhat out of context. Perhaps Rosedale was on message from marketing as others including Eric are noticing.

Office is safe from Google Docs, err no. Neither is SL safe from a more agile competitor unless SL too becomes agile and in fact lighter on the client side. We still may be waiting on that competitor.

One wag in our office says “Second Life is the Gopher of virtual worlds; it looks so good because there is so little else to look at.” That will not remain true; there is no doubt a WWW for virtual worlds out there.

On other Second Life fronts, I went to visit the ibiblio homestead on SL today. It was gone. We must have had a subsubsubsubprime morgage the invisible second hand of SL economics moved swiftly and our building was no more.

I am right; Kevin is wrong

Are online campaign efforts effective?
As campaigns flood Internet, opinions vary on effectiveness

by Jerry Kammer – Jul. 9, 2008 12:00 AM
Republic Washington Bureau

[…]

One of the inventors of the Internet technology that Gill used in 1992 to send those e-mails thinks the trend is for opposing groups to isolate themselves behind virtual electronic walls.

“Folks don’t want to interact with every stranger, but to keep in contact with their tribes,” said Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina.

A Jones colleague in developing Internet technology acknowledges the tribal effects but thinks much more is going on because of the Internet’s raw democratizing power, pervasiveness and ease of use.

“I know I’m drawn to blogs and sites that share my point of view, but there’s a lot of cross-talk at the fringes,” said Kevin Gamiel, also of UNC. “There’s definitely some cross-pollination going on.”

[…]

The UN-conferences coming, recent, and almost

Startup Weekend RDU happened this past weekend and got great media coverage. Some in NandO here. It was @tuckcomatus last weekend before his macroeconomics camp, so I skipped, but the blog, video, and coverage look great.

FooCamp, perhaps the original, gets some mention on TechCrunch. (I haven’t been in a couple of years and it looks less spontaneous frankly)

This year’s BarCampRDU will be August 2nd at Red Hat World Headquarters. The registration looks pretty full, but if the past is any indicator, there will be seats. Folks will have things come up. Me for example. I’ll be happily reuniting with @tuckcomatus as we pick him up from his camp.

So much for unconferences. I’m on my way to Cali for Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech, a sort of conference clone of unconferences. Along the way, I managed to be quoted in Fortune/CNNMoney.

Brainstorm survey: What tech leaders want

Brainstorm survey: What tech leaders want

We asked attendees at our upcoming conference three questions. The answers show tech industry leaders are deeply engaged with big social problems, and optimistic that tech can help.

By David Kirkpatrick, senior editor

NEW YORK (Fortune) — As the iPhone 3G emerges, Apple’s mobile device has captivated the leaders of the tech industry. That’s the most certain conclusion Fortune reached after surveying 325 industry leaders who will be attending our Brainstorm Tech conference July 21-23.

The three questions: 1) What is the most exciting technology innovation you’ve seen in the past 12 months? 2) What is your biggest hope or fear for the future, and how does tech relate to it? and 3) What should the top priority be for the next U.S. president?

An astonishing number – about half – said the iPhone was the most exciting thing they’d seen. Otherwise, answers were kaleidoscopic. Here are some of them.

[…]

Priority for next U.S. president

“Bring access to health care in the U.S. up to the global standard.” – Paul Jones, creator, ibiblio.org

[…]

TODAY: Open Source at SILS and at UNC

This just out, on some short notice, beginning to bring together a focus on Open Source, Open Content, Open Formats, and Open Access at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Your ideas and suggestions welcome (come, write and/or comment)

Noon on Wednesday, July 9, in room 214 of the True Manning Hall. See you there.

Open Source Brainstorming session July 9 at high noon

Many of us in SILS make use of open source technologies, of open source licenses (like GPL and Creative Commons), of open access journals (like PLoS journals), and favor open access to information. One of the world’s most successful Open Source companies is our neighbor (Red Hat) and other companies with strong interest in open source hire our graduates (including IBM, Cisco and others). Many of us use and even contribute to the opensource ecosystem (like all of ibiblio and open-video). In 2010, the theme for the Triangle-hosted World Wide Web Conference will be Open Source, OpenAccess, Open Formats.

Now is the time for all good people to come and begin a more serious discussion on how we, as a school, can make a coherent place in our teaching, research, and service for the way of openness.

This aims to be the first of several meetings to help set directions for our efforts.

See also:

“Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software” by Christopher M. Kelty (2008, Duke University Press)

“The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary” by Eric S. Raymond (2001, O’Reilly)

“Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” by Karl Fogel (2005, O’Reilly)

“Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks, Reaping Rewards” by Dan Woods and Gautam Guliani (2005, O’Reilly)

“Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O’Reilly Open Source)” by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, Mark Stone, and Brian Behlendorf (1999, O’Reilly)

UPDATE: Notes, reading list, and soon video and whiteboard from the meeting today are here at the wiki.

Suggestions to journal editors

My Warren Wilson alumni list has been buzzing with editors and writers trying to understand electronic submission requirements. I have ideas! Slightly radical if you are a traditional or even new to electronic/digital submissions, but completely obvious to anyone doing collaborative work. Here goes:

Forget pages. Instead set a wordcount for prose and a line count for poetry. Every wordprocessor can provide both easily. Page counts are rigged by font type and size as well as line spacing so that there is no commonality between submissions based on page count.

Forget Word. (True I was one of the folks invited to the Microsoft Haters Conference, but there are other reasons). The latest Word docx format isn’t readable by Word for the Mac or any older PC version of Word. And it will be worse as even Microsoft is abandoning their OOXMPL format that underlies docx. If (and when really) you can ask for ODF do so. There will be a ton of programs that will read it including Word. OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Google Docs and other free software already does this.

Forget submissions all together.
Not as radical as it seems. Instead accept Google Doc links and keep the document in the cloud. You never have to wonder who has what version again. Editors and writers can easily collaborate on changes and suggestions. Everyone has access from every device — phone, laptop, Wii, whatever. Yes you can download and save at any point if you prefer the clumsy old way of doing business. Yes, Aaron. Mindtouch Deki could be used the same way.

PDF. It’s about publishing not submissions and manuscripts. It’s great for what it does. But it is an editor hostile format. Keep it where it belongs as posteditorial.

3 Soups of Summer

While shopping at the world famous Carrboro Farmers Market on Saturday, I realized that I could make up some good cold soup for summer from the veggies there. As it turns out, I could make three different soups. Each soup is good cold or hot, blended or left chunky. And it’s sort of a tour of European soup culture by way of the USA.

Soup number one – vischyssoise or potato, leek and artichoke soup. (France via Louisiana) Beginning with this recipe for the Tabasco cookbook but varying by using veggie broth and a few other tricks.

Soup number two – gazpacho or white wine based tomato, pepper and cucumber soup. (Spain via California) Again starting with a Tabasco recipe then taking it vegan and changing cuke for squash and adding cilantro among other things. I did it all cold too.

Soup number three – vegetarian borscht or beet and cabbage soup with ginger. (Ukraine via North Carolina)

I”ll post recipes and ingredients later but you get the idea from the names. Versatile and easy and great after any hot day. We’re set for a week or so now with no more hot kitchen for the duration.

As the Pot Turns

I’m not quite sure that’s boiling down in the great traditional pottery center of Seagrove, NC despite several papers’ attempts to explain it all (NandO editorial, NandO cover story, Asheboro Courier-Tribune story, More clips here). I do know that most of the potters whose work I’ve purchased over the years (Ben Owen III, Michael Mahan about about 50 others) along with a great local potter, Mark Hewitt (in Pittsboro) are all on the same side of the issue and are starting their own pottery festival/show with the help of local bean canning (and potting) family, the Luck’s. The Celebration of Seagrove Potters will happen in the Luck’s factory on November 22nd.

Social vs Collaborative

At the NSF Information Seeking workshop this morning, some one (all names and affiliations must be hidden) briefly mentioned that collaboration and being social were not the same. This got me to thinking.

Collaboration is, and I do my best to recall help me if you were there and took notes, several people working together on the same predefined problem or set of problems each depending on each other and each contributing in some specific way.

Social however is much looser and more ad hoc. The intention is less predetermined or predefined, more haphazard perhaps. In fact, social has more to do with Dunbar-ian stroking and grooming than with getting any specific job done. Social interactions may give rise to incidental help and even to collaboration, but that’s not the main intent.

Collaboration can be mandated, but social cannot. You can pick your friends — as the saying goes — but picking your co-workers and collaborators may be done by others — your boss, manager or the dreaded human resources department.

An ideal work environment for some people would have a very strong overlap between social and collaboration — all kinds of team building tries to shade us over to this overlap. But we still resist. Some people we accept for their talents, respect for their contributions, etc, but we’d rather not spend a week at the beach with them.

And we have great friends who we could never work with for very long. Whose friendship we cherish, but whose skills we’d rather not have to depend on.

This points out the weaknesses of social networks versus networks for collaboration. When using say del.icio.us, I want collaborators for much of my research and teaching and work. But when it comes to say last.fm, I want my friends who share and enlighten me about music. People using FaceBook for work can see right away what I’m getting at. I do feel close to many of my coworkers and they keep me in touch with a lot of things I’d otherwise miss, but I don’t use FaceBook as a work resource — except for those times I need incidental or ad hoc help. I think that LinkedIn is defining itself less of a social space and more of a collaboration space. Not so much for active collaboration in any constant way but in a kind of punctuated temporary way that is slightly ad hoc but more about information exchange — I see Bill is in your network and he seems to have the skills we need in my office. Could you recommend him?

Both ends of a spectrum between the purely social and the purely collaborative build and activate social capital, but each seems to me to be of a different type. Types which are not exactly the same valence say.

Still thinking on this.

Fortune telling

1) What is the most exciting technology innovation you’ve seen in the past 12 months?

iPhone and iPhone 2. The first to say seriously: This is not a phone that can do stuff, but a this that can do stuff that is also a phone. The this that it is is still being defined. The opening, even a slight opening, of the device internationally and to innovators along with the social construction of its use with define the “this” quite soon.

2) What is your biggest hope or fear for the future, and how does tech relate to it?

Our approach to pricing and for maintaining Net Neutrality effect and create both my hope and my fear. Charge for all use models versus charge when it seems appropriate models play a part in this as does ala carte pricing vs all you can eat pricing. Pricing at each point both as a philosophy and as a means of control of markets will constrain or make abundant the availability of innovations in information technology.

3. What should be the top priority for the next US president?

Bringing access to health care in the US up to the global standard. That means a complete realignment of our national health care strategies. The health care cost burden must shift from employment centric to, at least, nation centric to promote an effective ecosystem for innovation and competition.

More Vanishing amongst newspapers

Phil Meyer tells the vanishing News and Observer that he’s given up on newspapers and only hopes that journalism can be saved in Ted Vaden’s column today. “At this point, the social goal should not be to save newspapers, but to save journalism.”

Ryan Thornburg just back from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education at Harvard asks who will pick up the slack from the Observer and News and Observer slimdowns.
. He answers somewhat in his next post — his comments from the conference “Citizen Journalism and Authentic Leadership.”

Our J-School Dean, Jean Folkerts, also back from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education asks for ideas for J-Schools as she concludes “An elite model of journalism education may serve elite journalists, but it doesn’t serve the democracy.”

Jay Rosen takes on the old school whilst attending the same conference in “Twilight of the Curmurgeon Class”

About Carrboro

I spent this morning and early afternoon in Carrboro as I’m often want to do. Why: Farmer’s Market, Weaver Street (with Rick Hermanson sandsculpture), WCOM, Carolina Fitness, and discovering the goodness of the Johnny’s “complex” on West Main Street.

Johnny’s now has a good Tienda/marcado in front, a nice coffee and pastry etc shop in the rear. ParlezVousCrepe.com truck on the side lot on Saturdays (until 2pm), and a great taco truck in the evenings — where I last got barbecued lamb tacos.

BrianR and I sat beside the coffee shop with coffee and crepes whilst he told me of his plans for Carrboro Coworking — which just got a nice small business loan.

In front of us in line were Able and Julia Parris — she photogs and blogs here and abroad.

That’s the Paris of the Piedmont for sure. Beautifully mundane.

Co-working comes to Carrboro

From Brian Russell via FaceBook:

Carrboro Coworking logo

We are in Business!
From Carrboro Coworking
Today at 2:16pm
(Please forgive me if you’ve read this on the CC Google Group already.)

Howdy Coworkers, Guess what!?!? Tonight the Town of Carrboro Board of Alderman approved Carrboro Coworking‘s loan! After working nights and weekends for almost two years we finally did it. The business now has access to funds to jump-start this business.

The next big hurdle is to finalize lease negotiations. I am working with the Arts Center in Carrboro to sign a lease at 311 East Main Street. (That’s next to KFC, across from Performance Bike shop.) Carrboro Coworking will occupy the front half. There are several other pieces of this puzzle that must come together to make this happen. But fear not I have a plan B for a space in case this one doesn’t work out. (Though I believe it will. Its the space I’ve dreamt about from the very beginning!) One way or another we’ll be coworking in downtown Carrboro.

Another major piece of the puzzle is your participation. As soon as I have a signed lease I will be asking for your help. I will be offering discounted Full Time Coworker space for sale. I mention this now because even though I have access to the loan there is still a real need for working capital. In short without you participation I can’t make our space happen.

I’d like to thank James Harris the Economic Development Director for the Town of Carrboro for all his help. He has assisted me greatly. Not just the loan application process but for being a wonderful teacher and excellent person. For it was James that really encouraged me to write a business plan and found the help I needed to do that. Also a big thanks to the folks at the Small Business & Technology Development Center in Chapel Hill . They’re significant time and knowledge helped me learn how to start a small business.

Also a major thanks to my wife Ruby. Without listening to me go on and on about this I wouldn’t have made it to this point. xoxoxo

So stay tuned Coworkers. North Carolina’s first professional coworking space is on its way!

-Brian

Books of summer

Summer starts out with booklists and online book clubs, Marcy Smith alerts us to the News and Observer discussions here.

Michael Tiemann is all wound up over Blooker prize finalist Lyle Estill’s new book, Small is Possible, and reviews the book here [Miraverse], and here [Open Source Initiative] and here [Amazon].

The Real John Dancy-Jones is Rambling around and Rambling about Raleigh and noticing and reporting on Nature around Raleigh at RaleighNature.

What am I reading?

Deep End – Bucky Fuller, Hodding Carter,

David McConville is the producer of this video announcing the Buckminster Fuller Challenge:


The Buckminster Fuller Challenge – SEE THE MOVIE! from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

Greetings Design Revolutionaries!

Bucky had it right. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That’s why we’re awarding a $100,000 prize each year for comprehensive solutions that radically advance human well-being and ecosystem health. The 2008 prize will be conferred June 23rd in NYC.

STEP UP TO THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE.
JOIN THE VANGUARD OF THE DESIGN REVOLUTION.

Learn more at bfi.org and challenge.bfi.org

The 2009 Challenge begins this Fall. Stay tuned…

On a somewhat related note, I’m just back from hearing Hodding Carter introduce Hodding Carter (father appropriately introducing son on Father’s Day) as author of several books most recently of Off the Deep End about getting into competitive shape for Olympic swimming events at age 41 – 45. (Not to be confused with the Weird Al CD by the same name).

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