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December 18, 2005
Martijn de Waal has posted a podcast of an interview with me from a couple of months ago. The podcast is about tagging ‘n’ stuff. It’s on Martijn’s new Dutch site on the future of journalism. (I haven’t listened to the podcast, and preemptively renounce everything I might have said.) [Tags: tagging taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
At least I really enjoyed doonesbury]
Note: The kid was a hoaxer. I was a hoaxee. – Dec. 29, 2005
According to SouthCoastToday.com, a senior at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was visited by the feds after he requested a copy of Mao’s little red book via inter-library loan. The agents said that the book was on a “watch list.” They brought the book with them but would not leave it with the student.
Ah, books on watch lists. Visits by federal agents. University research under the all-comprehending eye of government bureaucrats. Thomas Jefferson would have been proud! [Tags: HomelandSecurity security libraries]
December 17, 2005
One Web Day is getting even more exciting. This is Susan Crawford‘s idea for a global celebration of the Web and its values of connectedness and creativity. As with Earth Day, its up to each locality to decide how to celebrate the day … and even what constitutes a locality is up to each locality.
Last night there was a get-together in NYC with a bunch of us on the phone. Too many good ideas.
So, mark your calendars for September 22. And start thinking about how you can celebrate the Web.
[Tags: OneWebDay SusanCrawford]
December 16, 2005
Just in case someone else has the same problem: Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer both stopped displaying animated gifs for me recently. It turns out that it’s because of Zone Alarm, a program that is turning into a high maintenance pain in the ass. Anyway, to get the animations back, go to ZA’s Privacy pane’s Main tab and turn Ad Blocking to off. [Tags: zoneAlarm firefox InternetExplorer]
Go here, and don’t forget to bring your eyeballs. (Link via Tim Bray.) [Tags: illusion OpticalIllusion]
We saw Syriana last night. I liked it more when I left the theater than I do now.
I thought the acting was good. I found the narrative less bewildering than the reviews prepared me for. It came together better at the end than I expected. But it was surprisingly didactic given that it’s based on true incidents. The screenwriter seems to have invented characters in order to fill particular roles: Conscientious Arab Prince, Dissolute Arab Prince, Young Moslem ready to be molded into a terrorist, Hardened CIA Operative who speaks the truth, Slimy Corporate CEO, etc.
Too bad the character writing wasn’t just a little bit better. [Tags: syriana movies]
Last night at the Berkman Holiday Party — pretty much what you expect: dry sherry, fair trade cigars, male and female strippers with Ph.D.s — I apparently had SJ Klein’s idea. SJ is a dedicated Wikipedian (who, according to his Wikipedia entry, won 3rd place in the Cambridge area vegan cake stable height contest in 2002), and we were talking about the bruited idea that Wikipedia might brand particular revisions of an article as stable and reasonably reliable so that people could more easily link to a Wikipedia entry without having to worry that it will be different when readers follow the link.
So, I suggested that we don’t have to wait for Wikipedia to do this. Anyone could certify particular versions of particular articles as reliable. I could, you could, the American Association of Pediatrics could, because this doesn’t have to happen on the Wikipedia site. Dozens (hundreds?) of other sites already take Wikipedia’s content as their own, under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons GFDL license. So, why not encourage various authorities (personal or institutional) to create their own seals of Good Wiki Keeping, publishing a virtual slice through Wikipedia. So, for example, on the American Chemical Society’s site you could browse through the set of Wikipedia pages that the ACS has vetted; the seals of approval could be presented as authorized versions of Wikipedia – authorized not by Wikipedia but by anyone who wants to claim authority.
SJ has been thinking about this for a while. (That seems to be generally the case with him.) He wonders what happens to the pages to which the authenticated pages link, and he wonders what happens when someone tries to edit the authenticated page from within the authenticated site. Lots and lots of questions. But I think SJ has a good idea.
Not to mention that it would be a perfect example for my book about how knowledge is becoming miscellanized, and reclustered using different organizational principles. [Tags: wikipedia SJKlein EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
David Stephenson blogs about the Wired article “Reinventing 911,” saying its discussion of Portland’s distributed emergency system validates his “Smart Mobs for Homeland Security” concept.
We should be definitely suspicious of the telcos’ insistence to Congress that their way of fetching emergency help is the best and only way. It’s so clearly an attempt by the telcos to trade on terrorism to maintain the telco’s unnatural hold on their market. [Tags: 911 terrorism security DavidStephenson]
December 15, 2005
The Boston Globe reports on local citizen journalism, including Lisa Williams‘ H20Town. Says Lisa: “I have two small kids — you have to put off youthful fantasies of taking off for India. H2otown let me travel deeper rather than farther.”
The Boston Phoenix reports on video blogging. Steve Garfield says: “There are stories to be told. And there are a lot of stories out there.”
[Tags: blogging media LisaWilliams SteveGarfield]
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