I’m on a working vacation for the next few days — who’s counting? — in the lovely but rain torn Berkshires, in my family’s ramshack (is that the noun form of ramshackle?). My wife is away for the day, returning tomorrow, so I’m alone.

I spend a lot of time alone. I’m an introvert, so I like it, perhaps too much. But, like you, I’ve gotten used to being alone in a sea of clicks. Click and I can browse. Click and I can see what my friends are doing. Click and I can respond to what’s being written. But here we have no Internet. I am alone and clickless. And feeling it more than I would have thought.

Relax? I’m not tense. Take it easy? I’ve been reading all day. If I’m going to be alone, I’d at least like some reading that I can talk back to…

[Tags: vacation ]

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The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, is now available in full online. It’s an anthology of essays about hyperlinks and society by a great collection of folks. (And then there’s my contribution, which argues that the Internet is good — what a surprise! — because the hyperlinked architecture of the Web mirrors the architecture of morality itself.)

[Tags: hyperlinks morality philosophy ]

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[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen last night’s So You Think You Can Dance, stop reading now]

Hint to SYTYCD contestants: Apparently America’s favorite dance move is: mugging to the camera.

Well, now that the finest dancer by far has been voted off the island, we can at least be comforted that he’s bound to find all the attention and adulation he deserves when he gets a contract from … um … to play arenas like … er … and appear on shows that feature fine dancers, such as …. ummm…..

Isn’t it odd that America’s #1 TV show features an art form that it otherwise largely ignores?

I hope that Nigel and Screamin’ Mary stage a palace coup and next season disenfranchise the audience.

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Kevin Werbach has posted a terrific open letter to John McCain – on the news that Colin [d’oh] Michael Powell is drafting a tech policy for him – saying that technology is not a bunch of bits and bytes that are beneath the attention of a president. Nicely done. [Obvious disclosure: Go Obama!]

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A group of folks, led by Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze, has filed a comment on the FCC’s proposal that it give away some public spectrum to be used for national Internet access, with the requirement that the provider censor it down to what’s safe for a five year old. Wendy and her friends produced what I think is an outstanding, thorough, and legally-based criticism of this plan. (I’m proud to be one of the many signatories.) [Tags: fcc censorship wendy_seltzer ]

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I choked up merely reading a transcript of it on my cellphone on a bus.

[Tags: obama berlin ]

Must-see photo, shared by Dave Winer. Click on the largest size your bandwidth allows…

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HuffingtonPost today announced that, in addition to its usual front-page layout, it’s aggregating its content around 75 (so far) top-level topics. For example, here’s the Barack Obama page. This takes a page (so to speak) from the NY Times Topic pages, which pull together the NYT’s topic on something like 3,000 topics. The NYT Topic pages not only give a centralized place to read about something, they also give people a place to link to, which apparently happens a lot given the strength of those pages in Google rankings. Likewise, the Huffpo “Big News” pages can be linked to and are widgetized.

I’m not sure how the new HuffPo pages differ from the old pages you’d see when you clicked on a tag. Presumably, there’s been some level of hand editing, but I’m not sure

[Tags: huffington_post huffpo ny_times media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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More links that have come up at the Berkman discussion about keeping hard journalism sustainable:

snagfilms.com

reelchanges.org

glam.com

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Some sites that have come up at a confab in progress at the Berkman Center about sustainable models for journalism:

Spot.us for public support of particular stories

Jay Rosen’sKiyoshi Martinez’s journalism.me

Dan Gillmor on helping the almost-journalists

The “iTunes of journalism”: Mochila

[Tags: berkman journalism media ]

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The first in a series of three short videos from the Digital Natives project of U of St. Gallen and the Berkman Center that tells the story of Zack McCune, a Brown student (and Berkman intern) who “won the DMCA lottery” and was sued by the RIAA. It’s nicely done product by summer interns Nikki Leon and John Randall, and it’s a cliff-hanger…

[Tags: berkman st_gallen riaa dmca digital_nativescopyright zack_mccune ]

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