There’s a good interview with Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source in today’s Boston Globe. Here’s how it ends:

IDEAS: I want to get back to your take on mainstream media. Couldn’t it be that print media has gotten weaker because electronic media and the Internet are getting stronger?

LYDON: I think about it all the time. Let me put it this way: The rise of blogging comes with the still mysterious collapse of traditional voices around the war in Iraq, the inexplicable silence in Congress and big media around what had folly written all over it. Where are the grownups, I wondered, the people with memory?

Good question. Not to mention that Chris gets an Emerson reference into his very first answer.

Chris’ show is an excellent podcast, by the way. Take a look at the list of recently aired shows and if you can’t find something that’s interesting to you, well, you’re no fun at all :)

(Harvey Blume did the Globe interview, and it’s excellent. But the drawing of Chris doesn’t look like him.) [Tags: christopher_Lydon media radio radio_open_source]

2 Comments »

My old friend Paul English started something when he began a list of ways to short circuit “customer service” telephone response trees in order to reach actual human beings. His little list got so big a response that he’s upscaled the site. It’s now at www.GetHuman.com, and you’re welcome to contribute your own ways of outfoxing the phone robots.

To celebrate, Paul commissioned a 3 minute video from Wicked Indie productions, which consists of three Emerson college students, one of whom happens to be my daughter Leah.

So, somehow I ended up as one of the two actors in the piece. The other is the director and editor Jannette Bloom. Leah was a producer, writer, and camera person. The opening and closing music clips are from BradSucks; Jannette wrote and performed the jingle you hear briefly in the movie.

To view it, you’ll need to download the newest version of your video player because it’s an MPEG4 file. (Because WickedIndie was about to disperse for school break, the piece was written and shot within 24 hours. Take that, Steven Soderbergh!) [Tags: movies leah_weinberger jannette_bloom mary_oliver_masi bradsucks paul_english wicked_indie emerson marketing]

3 Comments »

Amensty International is going to be showing a light-hearted short in UK theaters (um, theatres) next week. It’s about the arms trade and it’s very well done. [Tags: arms peace amnesty_international film humor]

2 Comments »

From Tim Grieve in Salon:

The Bush administration is asking Congress for an additional $120 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — money that comes on top of the $226 billion the administration has already budgeted for Iraq.

Would we be “aiding and abetting the terrorists” if we mentioned just now that the Bush administration’s top budget official insisted in 2002 that the entire war in Iraq would probably cost between $50 billion and $60 billion? Or that the president’s secretary of defense suggested that the cost would be “something under $50 billion” and that other countries would be paying some of it? Or that the deputy secretary of defense said that Iraq could “pay for its own reconstruction”? Or that the White House eased out the president’s chief economic advisor after he dared to suggest that the war would actually cost $100 billion or — gasp! — $200 billion?

You have to wonder: What if we earmarked $200 billion to make the world more peaceful? Which would be the better investment? Which would make our children safer? [Tags: iraq george_bush peace]

8 Comments »

This morning if you came to this site, you may have been redirected to someone else’s site. Not to worry. There was an error in a config file. That other site belongs to a friend. It’s all well now. Sorry for the confusion…

3 Comments »

Global Voices has a blithely written, pessimistic roundup of Iraqi bloggers and a report on the first week in office of Bolivian president Evo Morales. [Tags: global_voices iraq bolivia]

1 Comment »

Steve Johnson blogs about a Bill Clinton talk at Davos, and about the question Steve asked Bill Gates. Entertaining and perceptive, as usual. [Tags: steve_johnson bill_clinton bill_gates games davos]

2 Comments »

Science Roundup summarizes an article in Science:

Social networks are dynamic processes that evolve over time depending on the shared characteristics, activities, and affiliations of their members. In a Report in the 6 Jan 2006 Science Kossinets and Watts offered an empirical analysis of social network evolution in a large university community. Over the course of one academic year, the team compiled a registry of e-mail interactions between more than 43,000 students, faculty, and staff. In combination with encrypted information about personal attributes, as well as lists of classes taught and attended, the team assembled a quantitative picture of how the strength of personal interactions depends on similarities between the individuals and how the interactions change with time. The results show that at least in this particular environment, people were more likely to form ties with others when they had a shared “focus” such as a class that brought them together or a mutual acquaintance, but were less likely to interact solely on the basis of shared characteristics such as age or gender. Comparative studies of corporate or military networks could shed light on which features of network evolution are generic and which are specific to a given cultural, organizational, or institutional context. [Emphasis added]

(Science Mag only posts the abstract of the article for free.) (Thanks to Andrew Weinberger for the link.) [Tags: email social networks demographics]

6 Comments »

The Boston Globe has reported that it distributed the names and credit card numbers of some of the 240,000 subscribers who pay for the Globe and the Worcester Telegram and Gazette by credit card….people like me.

This was not an online security breach. No, the paper the Globe used to wrap bundles of this Sunday’s newspapers had the information printed on the back of them.

If you were trying to come up with ways to shake our trust in the daily paper, this wouldn’t make it onto the list only because it is too outrageous and absurd even to contemplate. [Tags: boston globe media]

4 Comments »

The OneWebDay site is up.

OneWebDay is a day to celebrate the Web and what it means to us.

Like Earth Day, it’s up to each locality — virtual or real-world — to come up with ways to celebrate. Perhaps on this first OneWebDay your community can set up wifi for a local school, hold workshops for newbies on how to use the Web, or collect online stories to capture part of your local history. Perhaps your company can sponsor an online gallery of creative works or connect with an unexpected part of the world. Better yet, invent your own way of celebrating, one that expresses the value of the Web to you and makes the world a little better…

OneWebDay.com provides a place to aggregate activities so we all can see what we’re doing. Go to the site to see other ways you or your company can help make OWD a success. Why, you can even learn the secret greeting!

OneWebDay is September 22.

Hats off to Susan Crawford for the idea and for organizing it. (Disclosure: I am on the OWD board.) [Tags: onewebday digital culture susan crawford]

1 Comment »