“… can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement.
— Arlo Guthrie

Now’s your chance to jump into the Draft Larry Lessig movement at the very beginning. The group is trying to persuade Prof. Lessig to run for Congress in the 12th district, for the seat left sadly empty by the late Tom Lantos. (If Lessig doesn’t run, your contribution goes to Creative Commons.)

If there were a way to draft Lessig as chair of the FCC or as Supreme Court justice, I’d join that, too. [Tags: lessig lawrence_lessig congress politics ]

4 Comments »

A friend who wishes to remain anonymous has passed along a rumor that he acknowledges is unlikely to be true, and that comes from no known source, much less a source worth listening to. Nevertheless:

i just read this “rumor” that if Hil gets the nomination (via the dirty superdelegate process), then Bloomberg will give a BILLION dollars to Obama to leave the dems and run an independent obama/ bloomberg campaign.

Fun to contemplate, although I somehow doubt that Obama would kill whatever chance he would ever have of running as a Democrat again by starting a third party. But, heck, that’s why we all them rumors.

And I have now lived up to my blogger’s code of letting no juicy rumor pass un pointed to. [Tags: rumors obama politics bloomberg ]

5 Comments »

John Palfrey has dredged up a Village Voice 2003 article on Friendster. The article characterizes the site as a place to find dates and to check out people you might want to date. The idea that a social networking site could be a place for actual social interaction had not yet surfaced. Of course, the fact that Friendster’s founder would throw condoms out into the crowd as the official Friendster tchochke contributed to the perception of what the site was about.

Interesting to read the article now.

[Tags: friendster social_networking facebook ]

1 Comment »

Tim Bray has a terrific piece on the development of XML, now in its tenth year as an official standard. He focuses on the people, not on the technicalities of the standard.

It’s worth it just to re-read Tim’s words about Yuri Rubinsky, an SGML advocate of enormous energy and passion, without a mean bone in his body. Tim puts it better. Yuri died way too young, and I miss him.

It’s also worth it to learn the off-the-mainstage history of XML, of course.

* * *

Tim is a terrific writer. And I’m happy to say that we’ve been friends for a long time (which is somewhere between disclosure and bragging). But, the one thing that put me off in his piece was his providing physical descriptions. I assume they’re accurate, and he writes them with flair, but they struck me as irrelevant. Why does it help me to know that someone is burly and someone else is buxom?

And yet, it does seem to help.

But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe it only seems to help.

As you can tell, I’m torn by this. I’ve occasionally briefly described people in things I’ve written. But I don’t feel quite right about it

[Tags: xml tim_bray standards ]

4 Comments »

Brian Kelly worries that the W3C is making itself obsolete, and writes well of the perpetual (?) battle between perfect standards focused on close-bracketed compliance and sloppy practices focused on getting things done. (This is related to the article in my newsletter about HTML5.)

Along the way he cites Molly Holzschlag, who writes: “It’s not the specs that define Web Standards. We are talking about best practices.”

The contention between standards and best practices so far has been quite fruitful. Fortunately, it’s unlikely to end any time soon. [Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.] [Tags: html5 brian_kelly molly_holtzschlag ]

1 Comment »

The creators of the amazing “Yes We Can” Obama video have a new version up that renders the video using a mosaic of Flickr photos — easier to see than explain. If you want your photo to show up in it, post it at Flickr and tag it “hopeactchange.”

Interestingly, the “act” page of the site lists the Web sites of all the candidates, not just Obama’s

The original video I found moving and inspiring. Re-rendering it using images from everyone who cares to participate is not going to change the world or even change any minds. It’s symbolic. Good. When the current symbols of America are George W. Bush and waterboarding, it’s not so bad to have a “we” symbol show up in our mirror.

[Tags: politics obama videos ]

5 Comments »

After trying the various phone numbers on the AT&T Wireless site, including 1-800-331-0500, 611 from my cellphone, and 800‑288‑2747 from GetHuman.com, it seems that AT&T provides no customer service on Sunday. So, if your phone or their software is broken, you are SOL.

Jeez, remember when major corporations acted like major corporations? Or maybe this is how major corporations act.

(There’s gotta be a national security angle to this somewhere. Do terrorists and hurricanes take Sundays off? Yeah, that’s the ticket!) [Tags: att customer_service vrm ]

2 Comments »

Howard Rheingold has posted the front and back covers of his 1974 book, War of the Gurus. If you don’t look closely, you’ll think it’s written by the reporter-columnist, Jack Anderson. Google Books has nothing on it except that it also gives a credit to Kelly Freas, the great sf and MAD illustrator.

I’m guessing that Howard is the Kevin Bacon for the rest of us.

[Tags: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson ]

4 Comments »

The very odd journal WordWays (which really ought to become a Web-based journal, imo) in this issue runs a piece by A. Ross Eckler that anagrams uses the letters in the various candidates’ names to make phrases. [The strikehtrough is because I got this seriously wrong.] These are in order of the longest words that can be formed from the letters in their names, but that’s a different story:

JOHN MCCAIN = MACHO CON MAN
RUDY GIULIANI = I RUN GAUDILY
MITT ROMNEY = MY, I’M ROTTEN
FRED THOMPSON = HOT FOND SPERM
HILLARY CLINTON = RANT? I ONLY CHILL!

He lists none for Barack Obama.

[ADDED LATER: Here are some anagrams:

HILLARY CLINTON: ICY THRILL ON LAN

JOHN MCCAIN = CONCH IN JAM

MIKE HUCKABEE = I BACK MEEK HUE

BARACK OBAMA = AM A BACK AROMA
ARK.: A CAB, A MOB
O, MA! BACK ARAB!
A CORK, MA! ABBA!
BAM. A CRAB. A-OK.
BAA! ROAM BACK!

[Tags: wordways anagrams politics humor ]

6 Comments »

Ryan Terry is an illustrator and a Flash guy. His home page is like one of those poke-n-play CD illustrated books for kids, except better. His previous one is at least as good. (Thanks to Marc Nathan for the link, via Twitter.

[Tags: ryan_terry flash illustrations home_page resume marketing ]

1 Comment »