Doc has a nice post about the fact that everybody is miscellaneous (to use his phrase), and why being lumped with others gives him aggregaphobia (another nice turn of phrase).

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There’s a terrific article in the NYT about Lessig’s Fair Use Project’s involvement in defending a small publisher who brought out a Harry Potter encyclopedia. When the publisher went from Web to print, and from free to for-money, the Potter folks sued, saying it’s unfair. The author, Joe Nocera, says:

For, as Mr. Lessig points out, anybody who owns a computer can now create content that is based on someone else’s creation. Indeed, we do all the time, by posting content on Facebook, on YouTube, everywhere on the Internet. If the creation of that content is deemed to be a violation of copyright, “then we have a whole generation of criminals,” said Mr. Lessig — which is terribly corrosive to society. But if it is fair use, as it ought to be, then it becomes something quite healthy — new forms of free expression and creativity.

He concludes on quite an optimistic note. [Tags: copyright harry_potter lessig fair_use ]

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That’s what Jock Gill calls “global climate change,” ne� “global warming.”

Good phrase.

[Tags: climate jock_gill global_climate_change al_gore marketing ]

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It turns out that the turn out of Brookline voters in the Super Tuesday primary was a whopping 63%, twice that of 2004 when that Howard Dean guy was running. No doubt this is in part due to the fact that last time, we were voting after a bunch of other states had had their say. But at least some of the rise has to be due to enthusiasm for the candidates. Doesn’t it?

BTW, Brookline voted for Obama. The handful of Republicans voted for McCain.

[Tags: brookline politics ]

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Finishing Crysis has confirmed my disappointment that PC Gamer chose it as Game of the Year, especially with Bioshock as a contender. Jeesh, what’s a game got to do to win Game of the Year around here?

Crysis was good. The graphics are the most photo realistic ever, even though I had to stop ’em down and revert to DX9 to run the game — and this is with a high end machine and graphics card. But, the plot is totally familiar, the enemies were derivative — Matrix-y vermin, HalfLifey striders — , and the game play was fun until it ran out of steam in the final acts where increasing the size of a boss replaces having a new idea. Overall, Crysis is good but not great, much less best of the year.

Bioshock, on the other hand, was far more creative. It was an improbable yet convincing world, beautifully rendered, with fantastic sound and terrific comic acting. It was involving not just as a narrative but as a place. Yes, there were some nits ,the DRM was especially insulting, and the gameplay was occasionally off — solving the pipe flow puzzle gets tiresome after the first couple of dozen times — and the very last scene sort of sucked, but Bioshock violated rules in the name of creativity and actually had some ideas in it.

In the fullness of time — now — the crowning of Crysis over Bioshock will be seen as the folly it is.

PS: The Orange Box was also better than Crysis, and is officially your PC Gaming Value of the Year. [Tags: crysis bioshock orange_box pc_games games ]

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Dave’s posted a truly unfortunate photo of McCain…

[Tags: mccain dave_winer bush politics ]

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The Berkman Center has an amazing string of events set up this spring, in part as a celebration of the Center’s tenth year. You can see the list here.

And don’t forget Monday evening’s performance by and conversation with Brad Sucks, a thoroughly webby musician with a pure heart and low self-esteem. It’ll be in Griswold Hall Room 110 at Harvard Law. It’s free and open to all; rsvp to [email protected].

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My fellow Fellow, Persephone Miel, wonders why bloggers are not all over a juicy story like NPR’s piece on Fort Drum advising veterans away from benefits (to oversimplify the situation). That story seems to have it all. Yet hardly any bloggers have picked it up.

She writes:

Here is where the “cream will rise to the top” theory crashes and burns. In addition to being well-reported by an award-winning reporter at a reputable news organization, this story has everything: it’s political, it’s potentially useful to vets who might have been denied benefits unfairly, it builds on the Walter Reed story, it’s ideally suited to citizen journalism (someone needs to find the other 10 hospitals visited by the deserves-to-be-infamous Col. Becky Baker and find out what she said there). But except for the Army’s public clarification with regards to Fort Drum, I’m betting it sinks without a trace into the blood-dark sea of election horse-race commentary. I hope someone proves me wrong.

This new media ecology is so complex, and such a rich field for study and research. (Not entirely by coincidence, Persephone is putting together a conference on researching participatory media.) For example, we look to mainstream media to provide coverage. Bloggers generally don’t feel the obligation to report on something just because it deserves to be reported on. The factors influencing what we blog about are shifting, personal, and multidimensional. We may surface a story that we think has gotten insufficient coverage because we think it’s so important or because we think it’s quirky and under-reported. We may provide a viewpoint that we think is interesting (and thus not obviously common) or we may express outrage if we feel we need to weigh in. But we may not blog about a story that meets some of these criteria because we’re tired of writing about outrages, because we wrote about one yesterday, because we have nothing to add to it, because it deserves more work than we’re willing to put into it, because we think it’s being adequately covered by the MSM or mainstream bloggers, or because we have to go to the parent-teachers’ conference. There are as many reasons not to blog about something as there are for not talking about them.

It’s like reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. Which stories cause you to look up and say to your spouse, “Wow, it says here…”? You’re not covering the news. You’re talking about what strikes you as worth talking about…and what’s worth talking about isn’t the same as what’s worth knowing. The “It says here” interruption assumes coverage exists.

So, I agree that the cream doesn’t rise to the top of the blogosphere, where “cream” means “most important for an informed citizenry to know.” Coverage has been a property of institutions. It’s not at all clear that it can be a property of networks, or that a coverage system will emerge from a network of bloggers doing intentional or incidental journalism. [Tags: journalism citizen_journalism participatory_media everything_is_miscellaneous persephone_miel ]

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From Timothy Falconer:

Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops, but it fell through, which is why I’m trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere.

Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the Mother Theresa of Haiti for 15 years. In fact, a major motion picture is being made about her life right now, based upon her autobiography: Link.

You could really help by agreeing to sell us your laptop. We’ve only got ten days to get the laptops to Miami, as we’re leaving for Haiti on Feb 17th.

To see the kids that will get them, watch this video, which we shot last month: Link

Susie’s organization:Link (click slideshow to see the conditions)

To read an article by Susie from our newsletter: Link

One way or another, we’ll be in Haiti in ten days. Please help us bring more laptops.Please pass the word, and if you have a laptop to sell, click contact on the Waveplace site.

Thank you!

Tim Falconer
Waveplace Foundation
Waveplace

I’m giving them mine.

[Tags: olpc xo haiti waveplace ]

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Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool.

[Tags: visualization social_networks ]

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