The police are hip to It’s Carrboro and support it!
Author: Paul (Page 90 of 147)
TJ alerts us all to The Southeast Electronic Music Festival taking place here in Chapel Hill this weekend April 7 and 8. The Fest is a multi-venue event with music at Avalon, NightLight, Fuse, Talulla’s, Local 506, and Penang.
Get out and dance.
Looks like I’ll be a panelist at the Berkman Center‘s Beyond Broadcast confab May 12 – 13 at Harvard. Working on travel details. The Conference/Non-conference is subtitled Reinventing Public Media in Participatory Culture.
More news as it happens.
Glyn Moody did a nice piece in the Linux Weekly News on Gutenberg 2.0: the birth of open content. Amongst the paragraphs are good bits about the early ibiblio participation in cooperative creation of open content and support of Gutenberg.
One of his most memorable hits was “Town Without Pity” a movie title song from 1961. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Gene Pitney was found dead in the Hilton Hotel in Cardiff this morning.
MySpace is the second quickest growing site on the Internet over the past year (WashingtonPost.com reports), having grown 318% since last February to take the place as the 10th most visited site on the Net. Number one in growth, but lower in rank, is Blogger.netcom (thanks for the correction, Justin) at 528% and 27th in rank.
At the same time, MySpace is the target of a series of voodoo warnings including an overly cautious warning from Governor wannabe and current NC Attorney General Roy Cooper advising parents to shutdown their kids social networking.
Collegue Debashis Aikat in much more sane, in the quotes, except that he claims that “American young people have so much pressure to make friendships.” Err what does that mean? Kids don’t need or want friends? Kinda misses the point of being human, which does translate into online social behavior. Like the song says, more or less, “People Need People.” Most in productive and rewarding ways in fact.
Oh, Moral Panic, you may be rooted in statistically improbable fact, but you dog our waking and sleeping moments as if you were so much more real.
WillR reports that he saw the BBC-TV Blooker story last night. It’s online now (or for now). They did a cute trick with video effects that makes it look like you are seeing the series of interviews in a QT player on a large Mac OS X box. You may be, in fact. Well, almost — you can only watch the BBC stream in WinMedia or Real. Julie Powell, our Blooker winner is there, I am there, Russell Davies of Bacon, Egg, Chips & Beans, the anonymous Iraqi blogger (not Saleem Pax) and a rather confused editor from a traditional publisher in LA.
WillR sends this link which didn’t work so well for me. I did a search on Blooker on the BBC site and found the video link in this context which worked fine for me.
Journalism School Dean Tom Bowers reminds us that this evening (or very early morning) at two minutes and three seconds after one a.m. the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.
If we were to use the US 12 hour clock and were to celebrate based on EDT, we’d have two chances to celebrate — a.m. and p.m.
But if we were to celebrate using GMT, it would be more proper to celebrate on the fourth of May at 01:02:03 that is 01:02:03 04/May/06 aka 04/05/06 since most of the world lists their dates as day/month/year rather than the US’s month/day/year.
Tucker picked a gallon of violets and we converted them in to seven jars of violet jelly using the same procedures as last year, but we left off the wax and went for self-sealing jars this time.
BBC’s Outlook gave worldwide air to the Blooker Prize. Mark McCarthy writes from Khartoum where he is working with Humanitarian Information Center for Darfur – Sudan:
So I finish a jog along the Blue Nile and climb into my truck. It’s dusk and I can get the BBC on the AM dial at night so I give it a try. Who is that? I know that voice. What the …. Why is Paul on my radio in Khartoum? Am I going mad?
Over 120 stories on the Blooker are out now and I’m in a few of them. Odd to see myself in a Dutch paper and in Australia and in South Africa in slightly different takes on the Blooker.
Ken alerts us that IPv6 late-comer, Virgin Radio, is claiming that they are the first commercial radio station to simulcast using the IPv6 protoco. Unlike, WXYC and WCPE both of which have been on IPv6 since November 2004, Virgin is off the air after their servers have gone down in flames (according to their website).
They say:
These streams are temporarily unavailable.
Note that due to a serious fire, our IPv6 streams are currently down. Find our normal IPv4 ones by visiting our normal listen page.
Between returning from the University of Pennsylvania and heading up to Boone for the Odyssey of the Mind competition, I did a bit for Marketplace about the Blooker. Several of my collegues heard it, but not me. Stephen Fraser sent me the link to the story (my/Blooker part begins about 3:30 into the 8:24 segment. Lasts about 1 minute).
Not as bad as I feared.
UPDATE: Stephen sends this better link (if you only want to hear the Blooker segment).
As seen in Guardian UK: [with some corrections and additions]. More Blooker winner stories here. And the official Lulu Blooker announcement is here.
Diesel, death and dinosaurs
Overall winner and winner of non-fiction category
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
Julie Powell (Penguin) [and Little, Brown in hardback – pj]
Source blog blogs.salon.com/001399
[A great blook isn’t a website shoveled onto paper. Julie and Julia successfully makes the transition and grows as it goes having learned from the blog readers. The deeply personal story here, the story of an obsession, leads us all to see what could be trival and indulgent as a personal and as it turns out communal art, an art of transformation and of conquest (of egg dishes and of selfdoubt). – pj]
Runner-up
Biodiesel Power
Lyle Estill (New Society Publishers)
Source blog www.biofuels.coop/blog
[This blook too is about obcession and drive and community. The blook is printed and bound in the most environmentally friendly manner true to the last drop of ink to the higher goals for the writer. This attention to detail, to harmony inform the writing and the story telling while the self-reflective humor in the stories keep the blook from become preachy and sour. – pj]
Fiction winner
Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Cherie Priest (Tor Books)
Source blog http://wicked-wish.livejournal.com
[I am not a reader of the gothic, but this blook captivated me with its gusto, its invocation of a dark South both in mountains and in swamp. Priest can tell a tale and she can write a sentence that competes with the best out there. Stephen King should be very afraid. – pj]
Runner-up
Hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble
Tom Evslin (dotHill Press)
Source blog www.hackoff.com
Comic books winner
Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection
Zach Miller (Boxcar Books – self-published through Lulu.com)
Source blog www.joeandmonkey.com
[I teach people about the same age as Joe. I thought this comic blook was a non-fiction documentary. The humor cuts to the bone. It’s that true. That’s why it hurts but you laugh. – pj]
Runner-up
Dinosaur Comics: Huge Eyes, Beaks, Intelligence, and Ambition
Ryan North (CatPrint)
Source blog www.qwantz.com
[A single set of illustrations manipulated into dozens of different stories by the words alone. The art, i mean the skill and imagination, dazzles me at every page turn. Everyone I hand this blook to is delighted and laughing. – pj]
It’s Monday somewhere. Specifically in the UK. Stephen Fraser is a little upset that the word of the winners is out already, but hey Lulu didn’t plan an awards ceremony so Monday is midnight GMT if you are a leading UK paper. The Telegraph has their story here. The Independent has theirs here. And USA Today has their story here.
Who was the overall winner? The person who worked as nanny to the only two-time winner of the Booker Prize.
I’m waiting til Monday here in NC to announce any more than that.
U.S. News and World Report’s Rankings of Schools of Information and Library Science are out. University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s School, where I am on faculty, finished Number One (again). We did tie with University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and were a slight bit above Syracuse.
For rankings in speciality areas see the press release on the UNC SILS website and for other UNC Schools ranking see the UNC Press Release.
We’re on Boone for the Odyssey of the Mind state competition. Tucker’s team from Smith Middle School finished second in their division. As a result, they not only got medals and a trophy, but they will be going on to the World Competition in Ames, Iowa.
The teams has been wearing their very large medals around like, well, bling.
The Bling tag additional to HTML has already had an effect on me (see ibiblio home page for today). Yes, I too was surprized. I wondered how long I had lived a life without BLING.
BLING Team members, Joey, Jonathan and Dan say:
Much has been said in recent years regarding the imperative to separate the concerns of presentation and content. Mechanisms of presentation are subject to radical change, whether merely stylistic or mandated by technological progression. The Hyper-Text Markup Language that fulled the early days of the web revolution has been reincarnated as XHTML. It is joined by its newborn cousin, RSS, in heralding a new revolution that some have called Web 2.0.
Here at ibiblio, we take a more philosophical view regarding the separation of presentation and content. We cannot dismiss the importance of presentation as “mere style.” The aesthetic perception of an utterance is inextricably tied up with its semantics as well as its rhetorical impact. As Marshal McLuhan famously said: the medium is the message.

On BBC with the Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, and one of the Africa Fresh contributors, Gaynor Paynter, we talk about what makes a good blook and a good blog and their experience in blogging and blooking. Both have great things to say. Should run on Monday along with revealing the Blooker winners.
Got to meet the folks putting on the Journal of International and Economic Law Symposium last night for dinner. Great bunch of folks and a lot of lively conversation. Larry Rosen, Jean Camp, Patrick McCormick, Sophia D.Tawil, Claudette A. Pulido and Matthew D. Satchwell were at our table. Patrick gets to follow me this morning. Sophia, Claudette and Matt are from the Journal and are the organizers of the Symposium.
Put up my slides so’s that they are available on the web along with the symposium announcement with the bios of all of the participants.

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