Sandhill Trek

iDog

Remember those Japanese toys that you had to stroke to keep alive?  Ben pointed out the iDog, a similar gadget.

With a built-in speaker, a distinct array of moods, and a personality that changes with the music you "feed" it, iDog is a faithful music companion.

Netvibes and Writely...

Welcome to Netvibes!

This is your personalized page, you can now modify everything: move modules, add new RSS/ATOM feeds, change the parameters for each module, etc. Your modifications are saved in real-time and you'll find your page when you get back on Netvibes.com. If you want to be able to access your page from any computer, you can sign in (at the top right) with your email and a password.

The content is available from the "add content" button at the top left of this page.

Feel free to check the Netvibes blog to stay tuned about new features on the site.

...and they're collaborating with Writely.  This Web 2.0 thing has exploded.

Coming Monday...

With a little help from our friends...

Michelle Goodrich put the logo together at Mandarin Design in a table layout.  Chris Locke captured it as a graphic image using one of the tools he'll talk about next week.  Frank Paynter stole it because it looks cool and posted it right here on this blog!

Next week, I'll assemble responses to this question and I'll serialize them here and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Meanwhile, I think a little Bo Diddley background music is called for.  And if anyone can find the Doors, the Yardbirds, or the Stones doing this same tune... well, it would be a community service to post the .mp3

How do you blog, how do you blog, how do you blog...

.gc Social Architecture Garbage Mining

.gc

In 2002, when he was a very young man, Aaron Swartz published the following license haikus (that's Aaron on the right above, in 2004, much older as you can see)...

• PD: do what you feel like / since the work is abandoned / the law doesn’t care
• MIT: take my code with you / and do whatever you want / but please don’t blame me
• LGPL: you can copy this / but make modified versions / free in source code form
• MPL: like LGPL / except netscape is allowed / to change the license
• GPL: if you use this code / you and your children’s children / must make your source free
• RIAA: if you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain

In 1995, Heather Levien shared the following with regard to her dissertation...

Earlier in this century, various British and American modernists deployed textual innovation to trace out the precise specificities of multiple characters' consciousness interacting within the work of art.  Depictions of individuals in novels such as Ulysses, The Waves and As I Lay Dying were surrounded by various sorts of ellipses intended to emphasize the importance of the spaces between individuals.  The more recent work which I intend to examine emphasizes the positioning of the individual in relation to its various spacial and temporal contexts, focusing not on individuals separated by some sort of break or lapse but in their constant connection to a variety of social and historical contexts and discourses.

More recently, Danah Boyd averred,

Professional conferences are fundamentally social networking events; don't let anyone convince you that people are there to listen to lectures. We attend to connect with the people that we know and meet new people who might inspire us (or hire us). Professional conferences are also primarily word-of-mouth events, particularly the smaller ones. You go because your colleagues are going or because someone you know is going and you track their whereabouts. Additionally, speakers are frequently chosen by organizers who they know; they hope these speakers will attract a particular (paying) crowd. Well, by and large, we are friends with, listen to and know of with people like us, making conferences painfully homogeneous affairs.

Tasty Links

If only Rube Goldberg could see this!
(Thanx to Amanda Congdon for the link).

Oh, and if you remember this, raise your hand.
(Thanx to the Real Paul Jones at UNC, and thanx to Tola for reminding me).

Finally, this ought to give you a lift.
(Caution... pdf ahead.  Courtesy of liftport.)

Lessig on Google Print Service

(Bravo to Dr. W. for pointing to the brief Lessig post in Wired...)

Lessig's comments on the Authors Guild brouhaha around Google Print and copyright are of the "let's you and him fight" variety and to be expected from a lawyer trained in the adversarial arts. Certainly if Google was a mom and pop scannery making indexed versions of print publications available under fair use provisions of the copyright law, the Authors Guild would not have seen value in a lawsuit (though arguably they may have chilled mom and pop right out of business with the threat).  Lessig would like to see Google defend their right to scan printed matter and make indexed information of copyrighted textual work available within the fair use guidelines of American copyright law.  He seems to be afraid that they will reach a settlement with their antagonists and that the matter will be resolved without the ritual opening of purses to the Knights of the bar.

I want Google's work to continue more than I care about the legal jousting.  Google's project has been underway for about two years.  They have a program for publishers, a program that should protect the rights of authors.  Google is "partnering" with four universities and the New York Public Library to digitize a lot of books.  If it was strictly a cash and carry contractual relationship, a project with libraries paying a scanning and indexing company a fee for service, then the complexities of fear associated with the newly risen corporate monolith of Search would be easily dismissed.  But since Google is a full partner whose shareholders have interests in some ways orthogonal to the libraries users' interests, the matter is more complicated than Larry Lessig allows.

(Disclosure:  I'm a bit of a socialist with a desire to draw a bright line between private commerce and public concerns.  Schools, libraries, and access to information on the net are public concerns.) 

Tech-toch

Straw poll... if I had more than a few readers who were willing to follow links and comment, I'd ask about the relative level of interest people feel about these two items...

Dan Bricklin introduces wikiCalc (rel 0.1)

Dave Winer publishes Gates/Ozzie memos

Personally, I'm voting for wikiCalc.  No offense to the captains of industry, you understand... but whether it's killer apps or apps that give you butterfly kisses on the cheek, Dan's the man.

Blog as Bookmark

I could tag this technorahrah, or I could tag this del.icio.us or spu.rio.us or whaddevah...  but I have chosen to use my little ol' typepad blogorama to store the link and I hope I find time to get back to it so that some day I may make my fortune in wonderful world of codery.  If I don't die first.

AJAX TUTORIAL

and thanks to Joey d. for the "suit friendly" linkdump!  I enjoyed it almost as much as the parade o' Archie comix!

Bit Torrent?

"Far too many people new to BitTorrent just install the client and expect everything to magically work. Then they connect to a torrent that has a ton of seeds, they get a horrible download rate and a high upload rate, and they think BitTorrent sucks. What they don't know is that their problems are almost certainly due to misconfiguration of their systems and a lack of understanding of how BitTorrent (and other p2p sharing) works."

Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova

Reprinted below in its entirety, the Amazon editorial review of Synthetic Worlds: the Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova (University of Chicago Press, November 2005).  I added the links to provide a webular dimensionality to the review...

From EverQuest to World of Warcraft, online games have evolved from the exclusive domain of computer geeks into an extraordinarily lucrative staple of the entertainment industry. People of all ages and from all walks of life now spend thousands of hours—and dollars—partaking in this popular new brand of escapism. But the line between fantasy and reality is starting to blur. Players have created virtual societies with governments and economies of their own whose currencies now trade against the dollar on eBay at rates higher than the yen. And the players who inhabit these synthetic worlds are starting to spend more time online than at their day jobs.

In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers—outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete? Will a day ever come when we spend more time in these synthetic worlds than in our own? Or even more startling, will a day ever come when such questions no longer sound alarmist but instead seem obsolete?

With more than five million active players worldwide—and with Microsoft and Sony pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into video game development—online games have become too big to ignore. Synthetic Worlds spearheads our efforts to come to terms with this virtual reality and its concrete effects.