Valdis Krebs has a terrific post about the effect of social networks on the Huckabee vistory. He writes, in part:

He found local social networks of conservative Christians, gun owners, home schoolers and tax reformers. It was in these networks that Huckabee’s message caught fire and spread to other networks that intersected with these. Soon Huckabee had large clusters of interconnected supporters, all reinforcing one another — friends talking to friends.

Meanwhile, Romney and the others where following common campaign wisdom and setting up phone banks, canvasing neighborhoods and spending money in the mass media — strangers talking to strangers.

[Tags: politics social_networks huckabee valdis_krebs edemocracy ]

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Andy Olmsted was the first American soldier killed in Iraq this year. He blogged at Obsidian Wings as G’Kar. The site has posted a message Andy wanted published if he were killed.

[Tags: andy_olmsted iraq ]

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I’ve just ordered a copy of Alex Wright’s book, GLUT, which sounds fascinating:

What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age.

Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, writer and information architect Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the World Wide Web. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our cultural past.

I found it via Terry Jones’ post about it, with references to that Miscellaneous book. Terry is chasing a database architecture that doesn’t suffer from the old limitations of space-based thought or limited computing resources. Terry promises more in a later post, so we’ll find out…

[Tags: alex_wright glut terry_jones fluidinfo metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The subject line of a message from Infoworld interested me: “Social Networking: A Challenge for the Business World.” The message turned out to be spam from an advertiser to whom InfoWorld had given my email address. (I must have neglected to uncheck and opt-out box somewhere. Foolish me.) Inside was an offer:

While social networking sites create new opportunities for users to communicate in real time, this technology can lead to negative consequences. MessageLabs can help your business take advantage of the benefits and protect itself against the risks.

I bit. I clicked on the link, thinking it would be interesting to see which fears the Vendors With Solutions are stirring up.

But, the link leads to a registration form with 14 required fields to fill.

Message received, MessageLabs! Sayonara!

(BTW, if you’re from MessageLabs and want to comment on this post, you must first click on this link. Thanks.

Ok, but seriously, these registration forms are usually a bad idea. 1. Most of the leads you gather will be useless, and useless leads cost money to cull and chase down. 2. The information you’re offering is probably available elsewhere more easily (the hard lesson of abundance), so even low hurdles are too high. 3. Gathering info from your users is not a neutral act; it positions you as stingy with information, lacking confidence, and ready to exploit your customers.

[Tags: marketing cluetrain ]

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From CNN:

The Bush administration has brought its concerns about the detention of a well-known blogger to the Saudi Arabian government at “a relatively senior level,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday.

Kudos to the Bush administration. Every now and then it gets one right.

[Tags: bush blogs saudi_arabia ]

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With the Iowa caucuses, the countdown to the countdown of George Bush’s days left in office ends, and the countdown of Bush’s days left in office begins. Hooray! It’s about time!

If you don’t see the countdown timer above, it’s probably because you don’t have Flash installed. Don’t worry. The timer isn’t worth installing Flash for. [Tags: bush politics iowa joy relief worst_president ]

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Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, under the auspices of the Center for Social Media and American University’s Washington College of Law, have released a report (“Recut, Reframe, Recycle”) on Fair Use that argues that much of the video remix culture does not violate copyright, and that we need a lot of leeway if we’re going to maintain a vibrant and creative culture. The report goes through the most common ways copyrighted material is used in remixes, and evaluates the application of the Fair Use exemption to each.

Plus, the site has five examples of each type.

Fair Use is a muscle we should be using as often as possible to keep it strong… [Tags: copyright copyleft fair_use ]

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You want to see some nice tech writing? James Pelow at PHPmac explains how to enable the Leopard apache server to use php. It’s written so clearly, even I could follow the instructions! (Because he wrote this in 2005, you’ll want to change the references to php4 to php5.)

[Tags: php leopard os_x tech_help good_writing ]

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According to the National Defense university, the Feds are entering SecondLife in force:

Dr. Paulette Robinson, Assistant Dean for Teaching at the Information Resources Management College, National Defense University, has a formeda multi-agency consortium to establish a sizeable federal presence inthe Second Life virtual world run by Linden Labs. Since the initial organizational meeting in July 2007, nearly 20 agencies have signed up for the ad hoc Second Life federal group, with more expressing interest every day. The Air Force and Navy have signed on as well as civilian agencies such as State, Transportation, Library of Congress, National Institutes of Health, and NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–two of the early federal Second Life pioneers. Dr.Robinson said the consortium plans a major push to establish a federal presence in Second Life and other virtual environments, and along the way create processes and procedures to make it simpler for agencies to get a life in SecondLife.

(Thanks to John Palfrey for the link.)

[Tags: second_life e-government ]

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Cyberduck works well for most of my FTP’ing needs. But sometimes I want to be able to automate an upload or a download without having to go through a graphical user interface. The Mac comes with a handy tool called curl. Unfortunately, I’ve had trouble finding instructions comprehensible to one such as I. (Here’s man page for curl. Of course, you can also see the man page by typing man curl into a terminal window. As usual, the man page is efficient to the point of being terrifying.) So, here’s a beginner-to-beginner guide. As always, use this carefully because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

To begin, open up a terminal window. Type curl -V into it and hit return just to make sure that curl is there. If it is, it should tell you what version of curl you’re running.

Excellent!

If you want to upload a file called test.txt to the mydir directory on your myserver server, and if your username is uname and your password is pwd, then you’d type the following into your terminal:

curl -v -T test.txt ftp://uname:pwd@myserver/mydir/

The -v turns on verbose mode so you can see all the errors I’ve made in these instructions. Once it works, you can replace the -v with -s to silence the messages.

If you want to download a file, use -O instead of -T.

If you want to do this by double clicking on a file in the Finder, you have to go through a few more steps.

First, type into a text editor the same line that you were typing into the terminal, except make sure that you give the full pathname of the file you want to upload. Save the file with .command as the extension (e.g., autoftp.command). In the terminal go the directory where you’ve saved the file and type chmod a+x autoftp.command. This makes the file executable (runnable). Now double clicking it in the Finder should run it.

There’s lots more you can do with curl. If you figure out how to do it let me know. And, of course, I’ll happily correct this post with the corrections you point out in the comments… [Tags: curl mac]

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