Juicy Fruit’s “blog” continues in it’s inane way. Now on the right is a “game”: How long can you hold down your mouse button. No, I’m not making it up. The winners have topped out the odometer at 99 days, 99 hours, 99 minutes and 99 seconds, which makes me think there’s a little bug in the software.

My favorite fun fact about the holding-down game: I held my mouse down for one second and was told “You held it 30% longer than everybody.” Say wha’?? [Tags: JuicyFruit marketing blogs]

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I wrote Small Pieces on line, posting the day’s draft every afternoon. That was a good experience, although to encourage comments I should have posted completed drafts instead of daily drafts. Nevertheless, I’m writing Everything Is Miscellaneous off line, occasionally posting ideas and snippets. I have trouble articulating why, but in email with Bill Koslosky, it became clearer to me by analogy: It’s like rehearsing in front of an audience or on a closed set. There are advantages to each, but this I feel a need to write primarily without an audience…even though the “audience” would in fact be participators and contributors.

Beyond the analogy, I don’t know why. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Gaurav Sabnis in India is paying a price for blogging a critique of a business management institute’s claims. First a lawsuit. Then new and dubious blogs sprouting up, making dubious claims about Sabnis and others involved. Then, when the institute started threatening his employer, IBM, he resigned his job. There’s an overview here. It sure sounds like a thin-skinned organization bullying a blogger… [Tags: GlobalVoices india blogging]

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Web 2.0 is a fine idea, so long as it actually refers to something. I am increasingly hearing blogging mentioned as a Web 2.0 application. I beg to semi-differ.

As I understand it — and Tim O’Reilly’s seminal piece on Web 2.0 backs this up — blogging is a 2.0 app insofar as it enables the connecting of pieces in new ways. RSS is 2.0. Permalinks are 2.0 also, although not the best example.

But blogging as an enabler of individual voices talking together is (IMO) a great example of Web 1.0. The ability to talk in our own voice about what matters to us and to do so in conversation is exactly what got hundreds of millions of us onto the Web in the first place.

Why does this matter since Web 2.0 is just a made up term? Because if we get muddled and start talking about blogging-as-voice and blogging-as-conversation as 2.0 apps, we’ll misunderstand the great impulse behind the Web from the beginning. [Tags: web2.0 TimOReilly blogging rss]

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BeyondVegetarianism.com is the site of a dispute over whether to classify humans as omnivores, frugivores, herbivores, or noneoftheabovores. You will learn more about the coefficient of gut differentiation than you thought was possible. (Thanks, Kurt, for the link.) [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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My life as a spatially challenged American

It’s my brother-in-law’s birthday today (Happy birthday, Joe!), so I was deputized to print out a card for him. I do this for many of our relatives’ birthdays since I’m the one in the family who uses PowerPoint. So, I wrote up a simple card with printing on the front, a fold, and then printing on the inside. You know, a card.

Q: How many tries did it take me to get this printed right, with the right stuff on the cover and the right stuff on the inside?

A: Eight. And by “right” I mean that it opens backwards, like a Hebrew book. I gave up.

Amusing fact: By the time I got to the eighth and “right” version, I had flipped the text for both pages upside down. [Tags: PowerPoint idiocy]

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From Making Light:

The nine Senators who voted against the anti-torture amendment:

1. Sen. Wayne Allard [R-Colorado]
2. Sen. Kit Bond [R-Missouri]
3. Sen. Tom Coburn [R-Oklahoma]
4. Sen. Thad Cochran [R-Mississippi]
5. Sen. John Cornyn [R-Texas]
6. Sen. James Inhofe [R-Oklahoma]
7. Sen. Pat Roberts [R-Kansas]
8. Sen. Jeff Sessions [R-Alabama]
9. Sen. Ted Stevens [R-Alaska]>

Henceforth to be known as the Nazgul.

[Tags: torture politics senate]

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Joi reminds us that Creative Commons is asking us to step up with some money. In an world that thinks ideas are like donuts — the presumption is that you don’t want to share yours — CC has become a valuable resource and an important statement.

Also at Joi’s, guest blogger Thomas Cramptom of the International Herald Tribune writes about Steve Ballmer’s visit to Munich, a city that’s gone all Linuxy. A snippet:

He was also interesting about the future of the corporation when confronted with open source. Corporations offer consistency over time and user support, Ballmer argued.

Several members of the audience disagreed: “Have you ever tried to call Dell or Apple or Microsoft for a problem you have? No, you go to online forums to look up what other users recommend.”

…

To come back to the original question: How will corporations look in a world where collaborative volunteer efforts do things for free on the Internet? Will corporations disappear?

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I saw Serenity last night and liked it. But I woke up wondering if I would have liked it as much if the credits had read “Written and directed by George Lucas,” keeping all else exactly the same.

I am so disposed to like anything Joss Whedon does. His stuff is compassionate and witty, fantastic and character-based, admits of complexity, and is more true about the love and weakness that binds social groups than what comes from hardly any other popular, mainstream director. Plus he treats his fans like human beings. Not to mention that he wrote the music and lyrics to the musical Buffy episode himself. (How he didn’t get an Emmy for that still stumps me. I guess there must have been a Very Special Thanksgiving Episode of Everyone Loves Raymond or a Hallmark TV movie about an intelligence-challenged school crossing guard who teaches her town the true meaning of dignity.)

So, even though I found the Firefly series to be too formulaic — granted, it mixed a couple of formulas — I was eager to see Serenity. But I can’t tell how much I liked it because I was pre-charmed by Whedon. Hence my Lucas thought experiment.

[Mild spoilers ahead. Very mild.]

So, if Lucas had directed it, I think I would have been amazed that I cared about the characters. In fact, simply having characters not carved out of birch stumps would be a big advance for Lucas. Did he take a crash course in directing ensembles? The movie wasn’t as visually imaginative as usual, but, thankfully, the special effects were appropriate, not show-stopping dance numbers. The big, multi-hundred spaceship battle was surprisingly inept for a Lucas film — who was shooting at what? The dialogue wasn’t fake witty repartee, a la Indian Jones, but was actually pretty witty repartee. The blending of genres was a breath of fresh air, although we were stuck with the question why in an age of hyperspace travel they can’t make weapons that never miss, not to mention how a six-shooter could still be an effective weapon. It was good to see Lucas get a little more complex about the Rebels vs. the Dark Side battle. But there were some typical Lucas plot weaknesses, such as stipulating that a single video player can insert information into broadcast streams throughout the universe. Also, I’m getting oh so tired of Orcs as bad guys. Three other big improvements from Lucas’ previous movies: No ethnic-racial stereotypes, no embarrassing faux-religious themes, and no dead spots. Lucas is fun again!

Of course, he had to become Joss Whedon to do that.

[Tags: serenity sf JossWhedon GeorgeLucas StarWars]

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Bloggers are on the scene. [Tags: earthquake GlobalVoices]

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