If I could write plugins, here are the plugins I’d plug in. Instead, I’m just pluggin’ for them:

1. When I want to put someone’s address in the body of a msg, I frequently will type that address into one of the “To” slots in order to use Thunderbird’s convenient auto-fill capability. But, all too often, I moronically forget to delete the person’s name from the To slot and end up sending it to her. I did that just the morning. So, I’d like to be able to select some text in the body of a msg and tell Thunderbird to do its auto-fill thing on it.

2. I’m waiting for a site to send me an authorization link. It’s taking a while. I’m afraid the msg has gotten filtered. So, I’d like to be able to tell Thunderbird to let through the next message that comes from a particular site or has a particular word in its subject or body. In fact, it should flag that message by coloring it, or beeping, or something. The dialog box that lets me flag a msg should let me indicate that I want only the next msg that meets the criteria to get through or that I want a permanent exception made. (Of course, a permanent exception is really just a new rule, so I could create a filter rule to do this.)

Thank you. [Tags: thunderbird plugins wishlist lazyweb]

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Technorati has a new feature that’s only slightly confusing but very interesting and potentially quite useful. (Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors.)

It’s called “WTF,” which technically stands for “Where’s the Fire,” but has another more likely meaning. (David Isenberg named one of his conferences “WTF” and then had a contest to decide what it stood for.) So, if you go to Technorati and take a look at the Top Searches in the upper right, to the left of each entry there’s an orange flame. Don’t click on it yet because the page it takes you to is confusing. Instead, click on one of the searches. At the moment, “Boston Mooninites” is the top search. Click on it to go to the search results page. The top result is not a result at all. It’s got a flame icon next to it, indicating that it’s actually the WTF about the phrase “Boston Mooninites.” It’s an explanation of what that phrase means and why people are searching on it now. Who wrote it? Anybody who wants to. So now click on the flame icon. It takes you to the same page you would have gotten to if you had clicked on the flame icon in the Top Searches list on the home page.

Ok, so now you’re on the WTF page for “Boston Mooninites.” Note that this is not the search results page. It’s where you get to create your own WTF for that search query. Or, you can vote on which of the existing ones; the one with the most votes is featured on the search results page for the query.

It’ll be very interesting to see how this develops. For example, the current top WTF for Windows Vista is a product review, not a neutral explanation. (I’m not complaining.) Many of the WTFs on the Vista list are responses to previous ones, as if WTFs are discussion board, probably an artifact of the layout of the WTF page. WTF is already on the way to becoming what it was not intended to be, which I imagine pleases Technorati mightily. [Tags: technorati social_software wikis everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Jim Moore (a friend and former Berkman Fellow) received a msg from YouTube that they’ve removed a video of his at the legal request of Viacom. Had Jim posted a Viacom program he’d recorded? Had he posted a clip of his nephew performing a song owned by Viacom? Nah, it was a 30-second video of Jim and some friends eating ribs at restaurant in Somerville. That’s all. Viacom complained to YouTube, and YouTube removed the “offending” video. No explanation of why. No query first. Nothing but one big bully of a company flicking its mighty finger Jim’s way. Oh yeah, the DMCA is a fine law.

John Palfrey explains (and as a Harvard Law professor, he kinda understands this stuff) that Jim is entitled to file a counter notice. In fact, John says, Viacom may owe Jim money if it falsely accused him (as it did) of violating its copyright rights. John wonders if a court might decide that Viacom is papering the house with these take-down notices.

Yo, Democrats, care to take a good long look at the DMCA? Or is there not enough light for that inside Hollywood’s pocket? [Tags: dmca copyright copyleft John_palfrey jim_moore youtube]

Five minutes later: I wonder if Viacom’s spider saw “Redbone” in the title of Jim’s video and thought that it was a clip of Leon Redbone. Does Viacom own Leon Redbone?

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Actually, not every happy community is the same. And the unhappy ones are at least as diverse. So, it’s good to read HorsePigCow’s reminder that communities aren’t always just a bunch of fluffy bunnies snuggling together. Sometimes what we’re calling communities are in fact arguments, or conversations, or people who happen to like the same brand of orange juice.

It’d be good if we could have preserved the term “community” for actual communities, i.e., people who care about one another more than they have to. But it looks like that linguistic battle is over and done. Oh well. [Tags: communities horsepigcow tara_hunt everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Let’s see. Terrorism is a tactic used to fight an overwhelmingly superior military force by terrifying the population. So, if you were a terrorist, how would you react to news that a great American city responded to electronic signs depicting a cartoon character by calling in its security forces, guns drawn, and shutting down the city? Do you think Al Qaeda uses the acronym “ROTFLMAO”?

This is what it means to be prepared? No, this is what it means to be stupid…specifically, the stupidity that’s an emergent property of bureaucracy.

If on Wednesday we saw how agencies terrified of being caught with their pants down respond, even though it means they end up pantsing themselves, on Thursday, we saw how an alert American citizenry responds to the sight of our security infrastructure running around in its knickers:

ROTFLMAO.

(I don’t know who first came up with that graphic, but: Thank you!] [Tags: mooninite terrorism security institutionalized_stupidity rotflmao media]

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During the hottest days of the Dean campaign, I traveled on the press bus for a bit and found myself talking with two well-known reporters, for Newsweek and the NY Times. In the course of the conversation I asked them how it happened in 2000 that there was endless media coverage of Gore as a liar when that was itself a lie orchestrated by his opponents. They shook their heads and admitted they were spun, and vowed it wouldn’t happen again.

Then they painted Dean as having a temper, even though there were no—no—incidents in which he lost his temper. Then they spent 3 months on the Swift Boat controversy, which was news only because the media paid attention to it.

So, I don’t know if I’m heartbroken or just weary to see the media leading with the Joe Biden “story.” Here’s the import of what Biden said: Hey, it’s great that we finally have a viable, attractive black candidate! That’s exactly what everyone, including the media, have been saying. It is the buzz about Obama. Now, do you want to take my paraphrase and say that I must mean that Jesse Jackson isn’t attractive? Did I just call Carol Moseley Braun ugly? Bull.

Sure, Biden’s choice of “clean” was sub-optimal. He says he meant “fresh,” and I believe him; part of Obama’s charm is precisely that he popped up seemingly out of nowhere (yeah, I know his biography hardly constitutes “nowhere”), without baggage. Biden, in short, was saying what everyone is saying, was complimenting Obama (rather generously for someone announcing his own candidacy), and spoke the way we humans do.

We humans don’t always choose the perfect word. But that’s ok, because our words get their meaning from the context of self, situation and sentence. To ignore all that in order to give words their worst meaning is what not understanding is about.

The real headline for the Biden story should have been: “Candidates speaks like a human! Media refuse to understand him.” [Tags: politics joe_biden barak_obama candidates campaign media journalism ]

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Aldon Hynes is going to blog the Libby trial and posts about what value bloggers can bring to such events. He’s not a lawyer, but he also doesn’t want “end up at the other end of the spectrum talking about which outfit which witness wore…” He says that he expects to be writing about the “underlying narrative” and “the impalpable essence of the courtroom atmosphere…”

Could well be. But I suspect what Aldon is going to write about is and should be essentially unpredictable. He’s going to find interesting things to blog, but they are going to be precisely that which he and we can’t anticipate. That unpredictability is a big part of the value of having bloggers at large. We don’t know what bloggers are going to say because we don’t know what will happen and we don’t know what it will mean to them. Hmm, a lot like life! That’s exactly why we want intelligent, committed people like Aldon blogging at events of shared significance.

If that’s citizen journalism, it doesn’t have that much in common with journalism except that both have public events as their topic—just as restaurant reviews, menus, and health inspector reports all may be about the same establishment. What Aldon will blog is not reportage—in fact, it assumes good reporting is being done—but it’s also not mere opinion or editorial.It is perspective. It is how the world looks to this person, and it is how that person looks in the world.

Blogging is the great make-sense-of, and we get to do together. [Tags: blogging journalism citizen_journalism libby aldon_hynes everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Stately, plump Penguin Books is off on an experiment that is likely to fail in delightful, unpredictable ways…for which my hat is off to them. They’ve started a wiki and given us—any and all of us—six weeks to write a novel. The wiki has a blog (but does the blog have a wiki?), and the Penguin blog talks about the experiment as well. (But does the Penguin wiki blog about the wiki’s blog? No? That’s so Web 1.27! :)

Anyway, a novel seems like an unlikely venture for a wiki. Too many dependencies. Change “Carlo” to “Conchita” in Chapter 1, and who’s going to make the updates throughout all the chapters? Add a penguin who invents pockets in Chapter 2 and now Freida in Chapter 9 actually does have a place to put the souvenir shot glass from Las Vegas. Not to mention that Wikipedia has reality to hold a page together (or at least a settled criterion for resolving disputes), while a novel has nothing but the sensibilities of a million penguins at keyboards. (Penguin Books has sicced some MA students on the wiki to seed it. )

So, I’ll be surprised (and delighted) if a novel emerges from this. But two caveats: 1. If you’d asked me four years ago if Wikipedia would work, I would have guessed wrong. 2. A novel is not the only worthwhile result that could emerge from this experiment.

I’m impressed Penguin Books is doing it. I look forward to seeing if the writing gets better or worse, if the discussion page is more interesting than the novel, what the sexy parts of the crowd are like, if good triumphs or gets into an edit war with irony…

[Tags: wiki fiction novels collaborative_writing penguin_books publishing books everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Pew survey (blogged here) that says 28% of respondents have tagged or categorized content is startling. And 7% said they had tagged or categorized something that very day. Wow.

Pew does good work, but let’s say the number is off way beyond the margin of error. Say it’s off by 50%. Or 75%. Or 90%. I don’t believe it’s anywhere near that wrong, but even if it were, that’s still about 3% of US Internet users creating tags. How many taggers do we need for tags to become a vital resource for the entire Web and all its denizens?

Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%. That 1% will add a layer of meaning (or “semantics,” if you prefer the way that sounds) that will seed enough innovation and connectedness of ideas—and thus of people—that we’ll have to go straight from Web 2.0 to Web 4.0. (Web 3.0 is about the Web getting “lemony-scented,” so it’s just as well that we’re skipping it.) [Tags: tagging pew everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 ]

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