Joi Ito has a fascinating, heart-felt post about the way he — and almost all of us — accommodate our positions to the context in which we’re speaking. He was at the Doors of Perception conference in India conference:

Later, an elderly man stood up and said that all knowledge should be available to everyone and that he didn’t think we should compromise on the copyright issues. He then said that the people are ready to fight and march in the streets and turn over the monopolies and we didn’t need to sit around and wait for government. It turns out he used to live with Mahatma Gandhi’s at his Ashram.

I felt a sudden pain. I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet…

It sent a shiver down my spine. And then it stiffened my spine. I heartily recommend the post… [Technorati tag: joi]

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From Shimon Rura:

The webcast starts at or just before 7pm on Thursdays, when our meeting starts, and ends when the meeting ends.

To listen to the live stream, you’ll need an MP3 player capable of receiving audio streams (using HTTP). Most halfway decent MP3 players can do this, including Winamp, Windows Media player, Audio (Mac), iTunes, XMMS, and others. If you’re not sure you can handle this, go to shoutcast.com and try listening to some of the streaming radio stations there. If those work, you can listen to our meeting. If you want to load a URL directly into your MP3 player, use:

http://rura.org:8000/stream

If your email client shows a clickable link, try this one:

http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u

(it should launch an mp3 player on the stream).

Note that the stream will not work except during the meeting. No call letters, not even dead silence, just *no stream*.

You can check the status of the webcast at:

http://rura.org:8000/

If you see an “Icecast Status Page” with a blank box, it means the stream is not currently active. If you see a stream, that’s what you want. If you can’t connect, then my server may be disabled for some reason and you might want to let me know.

If you want to do more than listen, join the IRC (chat) channel:

irc://irc.freenode.net/berkmanbloggroup

That’s #berkmanbloggroup on server irc.freenode.net.

All of this information, as well as our agenda, is always available on our blog:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings

I’ll be there, although there’s a small chance something may come up… [Technorati tags: blogs harvard]

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Michael Bassik at Personal Democracy Forum finds it distubring that Sen. Bill Frist was able to diagnosis Terri Schiavo on the basis of a video of her. So, Michael suggests that we upload photos to flickr of our medical conditions — “tennis elbow, acne, runny nose, hemorrhoids, or whatever ails you” — and tag them “Frist” so the good doctor can diagnose us as well.

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If Microsoft Word is no longer displaying recently used files in the Files menu, and if the “Recently used file list” option is grayed out in Tools > Options > General, you should change the value of “Add new documents to Documents on Start Menu” in TweakUI.

If you’re not using TweakUI and if you feel comfortable futzing with your Registry, go here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\

Set “NoRecentDocsHistory” to 0.

If you don’t understand what I’m saying, then you shouldn’t be futzing with the Registry. If you do, then you know to export a copy of your registry and you know not to sue me when your whole system starts to smell of burning grease.

More info here. [Technorati tag: microsoft]

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Thanks to Peter Morville, here are links to info about the panel on folksonomies at the IA Summit:

PDF’s of the panelists’ slides by Gene Smith Peter Morville, Peter Herholz and Thomas Vander Wal

Seb Paquet’s notes on the presentations

An MP3 of Peter Morville on “sorting out social classification” which we’re warned crashes Firefox but works on IE.

I’m really sorry I missed attending the Summit. It sounds fascinating: The leading thinkers and what a great time to be talking about these issues.

[Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy iasummit]

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I got up from chez Sifry at 3:30AM, packed, and drove 2.5 hours from Scottsdale to Tuscon to give talk on blogging to Reed Business Information at 8 AM. It was about 30 journalists and editors. I once again over-stated the case, but I think in the discussion we came to a more reasonable outlook on the fate of journalism. If forced to predict (and they did more or less force me to predict), I think we will continue to look to professional journalists for certain types of information — although the line between blogger and journalist will blur even more — but journalism is going to become more strongly voiced,; the voiceless voice of journalism will sound archaic. That which is purely factual will be listed in table form, and will be commoditized. And once truly usable, cheap e-reader hardware is here, publishing will be faced with the same challenges the music publishing industry faces now.

By the way, you haven’t had the Arizona Driving Experience until you’ve driven at day break as the sun snaps to full wattage at eye level over the hill you’re climbing. I don’t know why the entire east-bound population of the state hasn’t already been killed in fiery sun-based accidents.

Then I drove back to Scottsdale — out of eye-shot of the damned sun — and re-joined PC Forum. But not before I faced a dilemma: What do you do when your luggage breaks in the middle of the trip? My suitcase’s zipper blew beyond redemption. So, now I’m sending its contents on what will almost certainly be a hugely expensive UPS journey. Plus, tomorrow I have to try to get the airline to accept an empty suitcase with a flapping lid as a legitimate piece of luggage. I anticipate many happy Kafka-esque hours as they work on finding ways to construe it as a terrorist threat.

Then, at 2:30, Esther Dyson and I moderated an open session on tagging. About 100 people showed up and I think it was interesting, but what the hell do I know?

Then I had a chance to catch up with Doc for a bit. He’s fine and sends you his best.

Now I will resemble the walking dead as I go to the final cocktail party and dinner.

Soooooo tired…… [Technorati tags: pcforum docsearls]

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Doc and his son Allen in a beautiful, truthful photo taken by Dave Sifry…

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Brian BrianStorms Dear introduces his new company, EVDB (Events & Venues database). Calendars are a poor metaphor for publishing events on the Web, he says. They scroll off the page, they’re inconsistent. And there’s no structured data. And there’s no way of getting notified about an event you would have gone to “had you known.”

EVDB is event focused and aims at being a web service, not a portal, he says. The business model: Targeted advertising, commercial use of API, and used by “powered by” apps (web and mobile).

Brian shows a demo. We see a conference schedule. Every session counts as a separate event, under the parent of the overall conference. RSS feeds for events. You can subscribe to events that don’t exist. He shows a calendar based on crawling through Meetup.com data.

What does he hope people will do with the API? Desktop projects and mobile projects. Or services like Flickr where people are covering events in some way.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? The blogosphere is big enough to be a good market to start with. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 evdb]

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Trumba is an online calendar strong at aggregating group calendars. It looks full featured. Subscription based. Integrates with existing calendering tools. In beta.

Jason Calacanis asks why this is different than Yahoo calendar. They say: No ads. It will cost under $50/year. The Seattle Times is using Trumba, e.g., when you use their movie schedule, but the focus is on end-user sales.

In their presentation, they make too many big claims about revolutionizing and democratizing parenting, communities, large organizations, etc. In my view: It’d be enough if it were a really great calendar. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 trumbo]

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As the American government loses whatever tiny shred of genuine decency it had and as the American media loses its last breath of proportionality, Micah Sifry blogs about how the Schiavo affair ever made it out of the waiting room where a devastated family was faced with a tragic choice. [Technorati tag: schiavo]

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