Shelley’s has finished her proposal for a travel book called One Ticket, Please. You can get a taste here. It’s not your run of the mill travel book. No surprise: She’s taken some beautiful photos.

Be the first to comment »

Joi wonders if the world has gotten more democratic since 9/11, a topic discussed at the Atocha memorial forum.

Tough question. I think I’d say: More democracies, less democratic. More voting, less liberty.

2 Comments »

Last night I finally saw the ABC Nightline on blogging that was broadcast last Tuesday. I liked it a lot.

I know it was so basic that the reporter, John Donvan, explained what a link is, but not everyone in the country uses the Web. Just think about what the report didn’t do:

It didn’t say that bloggers are journalists, just not as ethical or competent.

It didn’t focus on A-List bloggers. Not a one.

It didn’t say that blogging is important because bloggers brought down Rather, etc. It mentioned those take-downs, but then put them in the larger context of blogging.

It didn’t put bloggers down as pajama-clad whackos.

Instead, it focused on bloggers as people in conversation with one another, and showed an example of how Maura, an ordinary citizen (aren’t we all?), affected her state government by blogging about an ill-drafted piece of legislation. It was good to see a piece in the MSM that focused on blogging’s positive effect on democracy rather than on its dubious effect on, well, the MSM.

Because part of the piece was taped at a Berkman Thursday night blogging session I attended, I know that Donvan came in thinking Nightline was going to do yet another “Bloggers Take Down Journalists” story. His research, including that Thursday night meeting, changed his mind about why blogging matters. The piece reflected that, and I was impressed by Donvan’s openness…which I think is called “good reporting.”

The wrap-up by the host, on the other hand, sucked. Once again, bloggers were little failed journalists, cute but inaccurate and unfair. You could practically hear the snap of the disconnect between the host’s wrap-up and Donvan’s reporting.

Here is Steve Garfield’s own cut of the Berkman meeting. I’d link to the Nightline piece but ABC doesn’t make aired programs available over the Net because, um, they don’t want people to pay attention to them?

[Technorati tags: nightline blogs berkman]

3 Comments »

Bruce Mohl has an excellent article in the Boston Globe today (read it fast before it gets flushed down the archive hole) about Logan Airport’s advanced parking system. It snaps your license plate on the way in, optically decodes it, and watches which floors you enter, so it knows roughly where you’ve parked. Every night, humans snap all the cars, so the computer generates a daily report. Benefits: Signs can direct you to a floor with vacancies, and the 25 people/day who lose their car can be directed to it. (I have never been more than three of those people.)

On the other hand, Logan doesn’t ever get rid of the data and seems to have no concerns about sharing it with the police.

4 Comments »

[See note at the end of this post] Microsoft Word lets you view your document in several modes: Normal (=draft), Web page, printed page, outline, and print preview. Yet there’s no view designed strictly for readers. That’s too bad since many of us end up reading Word pages we have no editing rights to.

If Word added a Read view, it could have special functionality:

At the bottom of each screen would be Next and Previous buttons

Adjust font family and size with a click of a button…and save your adjustments as a theme

We could highlight text and have it saved on a per reader basis

Typing would automatically open up a comment window

We could choose to share our comments and highlights

We could easily set bookmarks for going back to particular spots

One click and you’re googling!

Copying and pasting into another document would (optionally!) create a footnote with the appropriate bibliographic information as entered by the author

Why not just take all of the best features of the existing e-books and turn them into a Read view for Word? And if not Word, then why not OpenOffice?

Helpful reader Shannon Clark points out in the comments that Word 2003 already has a Read view with most of these features. Damn! I knew I should have upgraded! (Thanks, Shannon.)

3 Comments »

Bob Frankston talks about two important Supreme Court cases coming up — Grokster and Brand X — with an emphasis on the latter. In Brand X, as I understand it, an ISP sued because it was denied access to a cable company’s broadband lines. At stake is whether cable companies, granted munipal monopolies or near-monopolies, will be able to create walled gardens. (Bob provides an excellent set of links so you can read it about it on your own and correct my misrepresentation.)

Bob notes elsewhere that these cases are well-timed for discussion at David Isenberg’s Freedom2Connect. (I’m speaking at it and, yes, I feel good about plugging it. It’s not a product placement if you mean it and you’re not getting paid for it.) [Technorati tags: frankston f2c brandx]

Be the first to comment »

David Isenberg has photographic evidence that, unbeknownst to me, had George Soros sneezed as Ethan Zuckerman was talking at the Safer Democracy conference, I would have been mopping major philanthropic fluids from my pate. Damn! That’s like taking a taxi ride and only finding out afterwards that you were sharing the cab with Mick Jagger. (Btw, that’s privacy maestro Marc Rotenberg next to Soros.)

8 Comments »

Ethan has posted about 15 seconds of an odd moment at Martin Varsavsky‘s party. Of Ethan, Joi, and Dan G, I seem to be the only one with the good sense to be holding a glass of wine instead of a camera.

1 Comment »

CitULike is del.icio.us for academics. It saves citation details and exports them in a couple of standard formats. It aggregates journal articles for your posting pleasure. It encourages long-ish descriptions and lets you assign stars. Nice!

(Thanks to Lisa Williams for pointing to a posting in WeblogToolsCollection about it.)

2 Comments »

In the Madrid airport this morning (or was it last night? Hard to get my biological clock rewound), I was aimlessly browsing in the duty-free shop and decided maybe I’d buy a bottle of wine. I sampled a bigger variety of wine in the past two days than I did during my twenties, thirties and half of my forties, and all of it was just delicious. I saw a bottle that looked familiar, and figured if I’ve had it in Madrid, it must be good. So, for 11 euros (about $14 in real money), I bought the bottle and carried it home.

When I finally got back to our house tonight, I realized why the label was familiar. It’s the very same bottle of wine I have open in our kitchen. (I go through about a bottle a month.) I had bought it blindly at Trader Joe’s…where I paid $9 for it.

7 Comments »