Jeremy tells the story of how he had to fight the IT Department to build a usable page for the International Plan Genetic Resources Institute. He’s very funny. He talks about showing the IT folks how great weblogging was, but they didn’t quite see it that way. “I got permission from them to maintain my own web site … on my friend’s server.” Jeremy set himself up far faster, cheaper and “webbier” than the IT Department could. (A draft of his presentation is here.)

Why was there such resistance to blogging? “I think it comes down to a combination of insecurity and a lust for power.” They don’t listen to their customers. “I’m sure there are exceptions. But I haven’t met any in my professional life.”

Very entertaining, and encouraging for anyone encountering the same resistance.

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Oliver Wrede sets up weblogs for university courses. He asks students to take charge of particular topics, stimulating posts.

Courses are linear and end when they end. Oliver would like to find a way to create loop so it won’t come to a screeching halt. So, he’s making a knowledgebase, feeding into new courses what’s been learned from previous ones. In fact, it stimulates new courses. In fact, after the course ends, the weblog continues. 80% of the visitors come from Google searches.

See here and here.

He looks at the posts between Winer and Palfrey about blogging the NH primary. What isn’t said in the posts are a set of background assumptions and context. Paul Ford, he says, has categorized a variety of “speech acts” (John Austin, John Searle) routinely round in weblogging, e.g., two opposing opinions posted in proximity are an “OppoLog.” Two of his students wrote some software to map the links while indicating the type of links.

He points to a paper by Richard Seel (“Emergence in Human systems”) that give the qualities required for business organization to be emergent. Oliver points out that they are the same qualities typical of weblogs.

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Andrius Kulikauskas, the Last Remaining Idealist, is talking about this “algebra of copyright.”

Andrius needs things in the public domain in order to enable it to be used as micro-content. (Copyleft requires the inclusion of an 8-page statement.)

But how do you define a work and where do you post the rules and exceptions, Andrius asks. He wants to find a user interface design. He asks us to google “algebraic semiotics” to find ideas about this.

He presents a model that I can’t reproduce here because it’s graphical. Here’s a link.

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The BlogTalk conference is being live streamed here. (Vienna is 6 hours ahead of Boston time.)

For what it’s worth, I’m blogging this on the computer that’s being projected at the moment, so this is a weird case of live meta-streaming blogging. Meta-live streaming?)

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NASA’s Deep Impact crashes into the Comet Tempel 1, in July of 2005. Now you can have your name inscribed on a disk that gets incinerated in the explosion. It’s a can’t-fail gift for both the complete egotist or terminally depressed loved on!

[Thanks for the link, Mary Lu.]

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Here is an amusing page. Note: Read it a little more closely before assuming that the link is broken.

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Chris Green, who wrote the texture-mapping routines for Ultima Underworld, refutes Wagner James Au’s attempt to give him credit at the expense of id software, thus rail-gunning Au’s review of the book Masters of Doom in Salon. (My comments on the review are here.)

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Jonathan Peterson follows up on his blog entry about why social software is taking off:

Cocooning, technology, commute times, and commodity McJobs all put tremendous isolationist pressures on individuals, anything that can lessen those pressures by enabling real, emotional, human, re-connection will thrive.

I concur.

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Ernie the Attorney has a rollicking piece on why The Singularity — the moment when the humanity-robotronics combo at last exceeds the merely human — is to be feared. For example:

Unless technology is somehow going to make us better thinkers then we are going to carry into this brave (and sudden) new world our very strong tendency to be led by fear and dogmatic beliefs (a/k/a “bias and prejudice”). The only way we won’t pollute this new “Singular World” with our pathetic cognitive weaknesses will be if only the “intellectually pure” are admitted. Or let’s put it this way, you can’t send a “representative cross-section” of our current world there, that’s for sure.

(This makes the second time today that I’ve heard Kurzweilians accused of replicating religion’s mistakes.)

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Hilarious call from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Senator “Sanctorum” Santorum.

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