A friend who blogs anonymously handed me a stickie note tag from a pad she hides in her desk. I guess blogging is completely mainstream when the word is on stickie note tags in the remainer bin at the Dollar Tree along with last year’s Pokemon figures.
Category: Virtual Communities (Page 16 of 20)
Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities
No, not that poetry is written by or even for depressives, but that the News and Observer’s noble attempt at making poetry writing inclusive and fun was immediately hijacked by trolls.
For poetry month, that is April the month in which we are mid-way through, the News and Observer published a very broad sampler of poetry, 5 or 6 by different authors, in a beautiful layout in their Sunday Journal section. The online version has an even nicer color photo illustrated slide show.
Now the participation kicks in.
The News and Observer has some barely moderated forums populated by trolls who represent the darkest portion of the ids of some spiritually impoverished part of Raleigh. But never mind that. Poetry can bring light — perhaps.
Or perhaps not. The public, which must go through several hoops to join the forum, is encouraged to take a line for NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer’s poem and to create a new poem of their own.
I like the idea — part of it — The participation and the remaking and the building on in a personal and unique way off of the Byer poem.
The problem is the N and O forum. A glance at the postings immediately put you off. The first posters don’t follow that stated rules at all. What one has to go through to register for the privilege of posting with the trolls is just not worth it.
The poetry project is held hostage by a bad interface, an unpoliced community, and unfilled expectations.
In some ways, I’m happy to have this as an example for my virtual communites class upcoming in the fall. But frankly I would rather have seen it work out as designed.
Can this project be saved or salvaged?
Just talking with Ryan Thornburg and Deb Aikat at Weaver Street about the properties of podcasting. I proposed an initial three properties:
- Location independence
- Time-shifting
- Narrow-casting
- Personalized subscriptions
- Nearly seamlessly automated transfer to the listening device
and would add
Others? or corrections? Just getting started.


Carolina won the National Basketball Championship! Sally has the police report posted on isthatlegal.org – over 45,000 people were downtown in Chapel Hill celebrating last night and into the morning. [picture by Ruby]
UNC has made changes to the campus home page to celebrate the victory.
Bloggy, the creative product of Fred Stutzman, has grown a lot in the past few days. Originally Bloggy was to be in action only for one day, but the power of Bloggy’s love and its cuddliness and the subtle artificial intelligence of Bloggy have attracted a large following over at its blog which is well worth the read.
Cheryl sent me a link to the art of El Rey; he has things you need to buy. He should not be confused with L. Ron or El Vis.
I’m be in the air most of the day heading east and wondering how an airplane food salad box can be offered for sale for $10 without the seller being overwhelmed by irony and guilt. No mid-air blogging expected.
During the CW Tux event last night, I got to meet and talk with Susan Best and Jim Buckmaster. Jim is CEO of Craig’s List which has within the last year or so appeared in the Triangle area. Susan does PR for several folks that I know but cannot list here for various reasons (the main one being my faculty memory).
TJ, with the help of bloggy, has the video and audio of the Triangle Bloggers Conference posted on the ibiblio speakers site. You can catch the parts you missed or revisit your favorite parts of the conference.
Dan Gillmor’s talk given that same week is also posted.
Thanks TJ and to John Joseph.
I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow thru early Monday and will be receiving a Computerworld Heroes medal on Sunday. This is no April Fool’s joke. I’ll be receiving the medal as the first step of a process that has a couple of more stages, but this part includes my wearing a tux to dinner — and wearing the medal to dinner! So the spirit of foolishness is somewhat preserved as I will look more like Harpo Marx than anyone distinguished. The distinction belongs to everyone who has contributed to sunsite-metalab-ibiblio in the past over a dozen years. The list is long, very long and I am deeply in debt to you all and delighted to represent you at the Awards.
If you are in Frisco, drop me a line or gimme a call and let’s get together. Saturday afternoon and/or evening is best for getting together as the awards start at noonish and continue into the evening.
What: Computerworld Heroes Awards
Where: San Francisco City Hall
When: Public ceremony – Noon Sunday April 3
Where’s Paul staying: Sir Francis Drake Hotel
Some time in the next few hours, at least before tomorrow noon, the ibiblio team will be revealing a special top secret project that will make the Makers at MIT insanely jealous, that will help Dave Winer in his quest to lose weight, that will compete with Doc Searls for having the best collective knowledge of net.goingson, that will help NC State and Duke forget their NCAA loses, that will put shine on Howard Rheingold’s shoes, that will double the value of Tim O’Reilly’s backlist, that will make a preacher lay his Bible down, that will make a coon dog hung a hound, that will complete Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, that will be of course under Creative Commons license, that will help Jessamyn West tolerate overdue books, that will combine the Cathedral AND the Bazaar and the Bizarre, that will allow Larry Lessig to wear a color other than black, that will allow Jamie Boyle to speak with a Southern Drawl, that will give Eben Moglen a close shave, that will make John Hood approve of public transportation, that will allow Douglas Rushkoff to drink a can of Sprite without irony, that will turn Boing Boing into something serious and Cory Doctorow into a long haired poet, that will allow Pamela Jones to see the upsides of the SCO claims, that will fill in the large blank spots in Roblimo’s blog, that will make the perfect SlashDot post, that will get the attention.xml of Steve Gillmor, what will get down to the grassroots with Dan Gillmor, that will help Jeff Pomerantz find the next highest prime number, that will reveal Glenn Otis Brown‘s biggest secret, that will put hair back on Bob Young‘s head (so he can quit wearing so many hats, [more later]
UPDATE Bloggy is here! or see the post above. After April 1, find Bloggy here.
Doc writes that he is amazed to see Tony Pierce win over Instapundit in a GoogleFight. But Tony and Instapundit have nothing on Paul Jones. We collectively chalk up from 10 million to over 12.2 million GoogleFight points depending on when you search (in fact our score could be higher). As a big winner, I’m not whining, but a difference of 20% is great.
I just got that difference in two searches back to back. Paul Jones v. ibiblio yields 10 million v. 1.5 million. Paul Jones v. George Bush yields 12.2 million v. 17 million.
Note that ibiblio bests Doc Searls and Instapundit but not Tony Pierce. Interestingly enough, ibiblio scores 1,570,000 when fighting Tony Pierce and 1,640,000 when against Instapundit.
One further note: A regular Google search for Paul Jones yields about 15,200,000 entries (March 31 at 8 am EST) and a search for ibiblio yields about 1,700,000.
No consistancy here.
UPDATE: Tony Pierce admits defeat to Paul Jones in GoogleFights even as he praises Motley Crue (which explains something about why he loses GoogleFights; Paul Joneses are all better musicians!).
Brian tried to do a 6 person (I was one of those involved) 2 continent Skype conference to plan a Podcastercon. One obvious catch to this is that the originator needs to be on a very fast connection since he seems to be acting as a hub for the conference. The other is that if one person has a bad connection, all suffer.
The short of it is that we ended up on a conventional phone conference system with a lot of us using SkypeOut (in particular Cameron Reilly in Australia).
We could have moved over to text conferencing, but the Mac version of Skype doesn’t yet support multiple person text conferencing. That’s in Skype for other platforms so it should be coming to the Mac version soon. Half of us were (are) using Macs.
Jeff De Cagna pitches using Open Space Technology, which isn’t so much technology as a process for self-organizing at a conference.
Loving the clarity of Skype and the connectivity. Last night, Mark McCarthy let me know his Skype handle and today we spoke about telecommunications in Khartoum, Sudan via Skype. Mark is in Khartoum working with the Humanitarian Information Centre. The connection was great and the conversation crystal clear. Mark says Skype is better than the satellite phones.
I am not a Skype salesperson, but I’m begining to sound like it.
Doc was nice enough to pick up on my references to Fiona’s stories over at his IT Garage, but he got a few things a bit off. First the article that has all of the links to Fiona’s stories on Muni-nets wireless and other is here.
Next, that’s Laurinburg, NC! Once called MacLaurinburg, it’s now called Laurinburg. The town is close to the South Carolina line — just above the famous South of the Border — but it is definitely in Nawth Cakalacky.
Anton, who as MisterSugar created our Triangle Bloggers Con and the local blogger meet-ups, and Brian, who as AudioActivism was just featured on Voice of America’s story on podcasting, have come up with a plan (in the planning stage) for a Podcaster’s Convention.
You can get in on the planning now. Just go on over to the Podcastercon.org site and contribute to the Podcastercon wiki. Already some very good folks signed up and contributing.
Martin Kuhn, who has been working on a working version of a Code of Blogger Ethics (which he calls COBE), writes to say his latest thoughts are posted on his blogethics2004 site.
Both Rebecca Blood and Jessamyn West have comments. Rebecca has a comment and Jessamyn has a guest post.
Fiona Morgan has a long cover article in this week’s Independent about local wireless access. My favorite access place, Weaver Street Market, gets great coverage (yes Jeff that’s an intentional pun).
Back in January, I noticed an oddity in an Nextel advert. Fiona uses that same oddity to begin her story.
Also of note and also by Fiona is a sidebar about a Philly-like tale being played out in the smaller town of Laurinburg, NC (16,000 and once my home) between the town and BellSouth.
As previously announced, John Edwards has started releasing podcasts. This one [xml] recorded not far from ibiblio over at the School of Government here at UNC. Wonkette has a bit about the podcast and announcement.
NOTE TIME CHANGE! NOW at 2:00
Who: librarian.net’s rarin’ librarian Jessamyn West
When: Monday March 21 2:00 (Vernal Equinox)
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor, Carroll Hall
What: Postcards from the Other Edge of the Digital Divide. Political Choices and the Information Poor
About the talk: While we read blogs, tag content and swap lifehacks, people in rural areas are still learning to type. Public libraries are making many more technological choices just to provide basic information and Internet resources nowadays, yet the paradigm for learning to work well with technology differs dramatically from learning to work well with books. Jessamyn West will be talking about being a tech-savvy librarian in a profession struggling into the 21st Century.
More about Jessamyn West: Jessamyn West is wrapping up her job as an outreach librarian at a rural public library in Vermont. She has worked in public, special and college libraries and done stints of on-the-fly reference at Burning Man, the WTO and the Democratic National Convention. She has maintained librarian.net, a weblog for radical librarians and other interested parties, since 1999. She is fascinated by the intersection of technology, the public sphere and politics.
Reminder that Jessamyn West will be here (here being Chapel Hill as here is actually San Diego for me at the moment) on Monday.
Full details here.
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