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November 21, 2004
Thanks to Michael Shook, here are some MP3 versions of my talk to the Library of Congress on Monday:
Speech (15MB)
Q&A (19MB)
The whole shebang (39MB)
The Quicktime movie of it is here in the unlikely event that you think seeing me will improve your experience of it. Or maybe C-SPAN’s Real version of it will work for you.
Found on Craigslist by Kelly Sue (via Joi):
“Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight – m4m”
I would like to fight a Bush supporter to vent my anger. If you are one, have a fiery streek, please contact me so we can meet and physically fight. I would like to beat the shit out of you.
Mark Dionne, who is apparently feeling a tad nervous about post-election America, tremulously wonders in an email whether the Red states or Blue states have more nuclear weapons under their control.
(Yes, he’s joking.)
Before bloggers were blogging, Conferenza was sending protobloggers to conferences to write up reports for those back home. Shel Israel has just sent me his write-up of PopTech, and it’s durn good – concise and thoughtful. And I agree with him that this year’s PopTech was superb. (No, his reports aren’t always this upbeat, and even in this one he isn’t shy about pointing out the few clunkers.)
Conferenza costs $200/year for individuals, although first-timers get a 50% discount. Is it worth it? The quality is excellent, but you’ll have to decide if it suits your needs. One thing it makes clear, though: There’s a huge difference between the type of spotty live blogging I tend to do at conferences and having a reporter there who is responsible for covering the event.
November 20, 2004
I believe this is very old news, but it sure is amusing: Learn how to fold a t-shirt perfectly in 3 seconds. (Well, it takes about 15 seconds to learn how to fold it, but folding it actually takes less than 3 seconds.)
November 19, 2004
I’ve been having trouble getting C-SPAN’s video of my talk to the Library of Congress to work, so I’ve made a Quicktime version that you can try accessing here. It’s 90MB of streamin’ video. I’m working on posting some other formats as well.
I love Zephyr Teachout‘s post over at Personal Democracy about what Net stuff worked in the campaign, what didn’t, and what will work next time. Not to mention that she’s a heck of writer.
Hmm. John Kerry just wrote me a note — it was so personal it was practically in longhand (and, by the way, “longhand” is a good example of a word with a “gh” in it that is not pronounced as it is in “rough” and “bough”) — pledging to continue fighting, yada yada. Then there was this sentence:
Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted — and they will be counted — we will continue to challenge this administration.
What’s that intended to signal and/or who is it intended to appease?
Meanwhile, here’s an audio message from Kevin Zeese, Nader’s campaign spokesperson:
We’re seeking a recount in wards in New Hampshire where there have been mathematical anomalies…When we look at those numbers it turns out that most of those anomalies occurred in wards where the vote was counted on the Diebold AccuVote Machine, in fact 78% of those unusual votes were on those machines. This is the first audit in a Presidential Election of an electronic voting count system so it’s an historic moment. Either way it turns out it will be good for our democracy.
Of course, to judge the significance of that 78% figure we’d need to know what percentage to the precincts used the Diebold machines, but I’m sure they’ll get that all straightened out…
This is way cool — a major news service (hey, we’re talking The Beeb here!) distributing its news by letting us view it wherever and whenever we want. And in lots of languages. Here’s an informal email (lightly edited) from someone who works there:
BBC World Service have gone public with RSS 1.0 feeds
I’m proud to say we at the BBC World service have launched RSS 1.0 (RDF) feeds to the public and automatic discovery of the rss feed is also in place.
There is no help or notification page of any type yet because we are tackling the problem of working with many different languages. The multi-language rss reader and aggregator market is still very much in flux it would seem. We are very much relying on automatic discovery at this stage, as not to confuse our audience.
We chose RSS 1.0 because of its universal acceptance throughout the blog/web sphere and it includes a date element for every single news entry, giving our audience a better experience of RSS. In the future we may offer RSS 2.0.
We do not believe anyone else has RSS syndication in as many languages as we currently do, making this a worlds first for the BBC. We have yet to release any information to the press or news sites like Slashdot or boingboing yet because we have not created pages to help people who are unfamiliar with rss.
—- If you would like to try some of the World service RSS, here are some examples.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/index.rdf Albanian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/indepth/index.rdf – Albanian in-depth news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/pressreview/index.rdf – Albanian press review
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hungarian/index.rdf – Hungarian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/sport/index.rdf – Hindi sports news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/index.rdf – Persian arts newsComments are welcome at my blog
So, put one of them feeds in your aggregator and smoke it!
Note: The author of the email requested that I remove his name from this blog entry, which I have done.
I spent the day at an academic conference for just about the first time since I left the philosophy biz 20 years ago. And the rush of memories generally weren’t pleasant. But, that’s just my scar tissue talking.
Today was the last day of the American Society for Information Science and Technology conference in Providence. I came to learn about cataloging and classifying, and I heard a couple of really interesting presentations. My favorite was by Frank Miksa of the U of Texas at Austin. He pointed out that we all tend to believe that “there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions, is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuus and is capable of being examined.” But, he said, that idea is collapsing as it’s become clearer to us that we aren’t slotting books (say) into eternal subject categories; the books themselves create subjects.
I also enjoyed David Blair’s brief overview of Wittgenstein as well as the panel on blogs and wikis (Cameron Marlow and Sunir Shah), but they were fun in part because they were more familiar territory.
Much of the rest of the day I heard talks that were either too far over my head or seemed to me to be simple ideas wrapped in a lot of academic mystification…just like the American Philosophical Association meetings I used to go to. One of the presenters even used text-only foils. No, he wasn’t wearing spats.
The woman who introduced the blogging panel said that last year there was nothing about blogging, and ASIST ought to be in the lead of the information technology revolution. I was only there for a day, but what I saw was not vibrant with the ideas that are breaking all around us on the Net. Maybe I just missed it, but in this area, ASIST seemed to be catching up, not leading.
The hallway time was great. I met a bunch of people I’ll be following up with.
Over at Operating Manual, danah is insightful about designing artificial social networks for interactions instead of for “users.” (See disclaimer.)
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