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April 14, 2005
Over at many2many I’ve posted comments about Meetup’s decision to start charging groups $19/month. What will this do to the social dynamics that have made Meetup so important to many of us? Will Craigslist will be the new Meetup? [Technorati tag: meetup]
Scott Heiferman of Meetup responds. A factual correction: Scott says Meetup isn’t having financial problems; they just want to make sure that it stays financially viable.
April 5, 2005
Go to Google Maps. Select an address. Have it plot directions to another address. Click on “Satellite.” Omigod.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but how about displaying street names on the satellite image? C’mon, Google, let’s get on the ball! :)
[Technorati tags: google maps]
April 4, 2005
Wendy Koslow has posted her resume on a wiki so her friends and colleagues can help her come up with one that’ll help her get a job in Toronto. Gutsy, innovative and fun, much like Wendy herself. (I added a section where we can post testimonials.) [Technorati tags: berkman wendyKoslow wiki]
March 31, 2005
Shelley has a considered piece on the discovery that WordPress, the open source blogging software, has been hosting a link farm on its site. ” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making money from their art,” she says. But, she adds, “I can also see that there’s been a dimming of the joy of this medium, as more and more people turn to these pages as a way to make a buck.” And she concludes:
Bottom line is: do you like WordPress? Do you like using WordPress? Can you still get it for free? Is it still GPL? Then perhaps that’s what should be focused on, and however or whatever Matt does with the WordPress page is between him and Google; because what matters is the code, not the purity of actions peripherial to the code, or its release.
It’s a forgiving piece — the final paragraph recounts how the Romans would make sure triumphant generals would remember they are mortals — which is great to read. We’re all human. But I don’t think the problem is that WordPress made some money. It’s the fact that link farms make one of our tools, Google, less useful. And it’s the lack of transparency. Of course, you can’t long host a link farm if you’re transparent about it, which is a reason for a legit site not to host one.
But why does WordPress owe us anything? In a legal and formal sense, it doesn’t. But, part of the joy of the Net — and I think Shelley is exactly right to use the word “joy” here — has been the forging of new, personal relationships with the companies that we engage with, whether they’re for free or for pay. I feel oddly connected to Firefox, Six Apart, TinyApps.org, and hundreds of others, large and small, free and commercial, because I feel that they’re doing something for the community first; they’re not in it only for themselves. I trust them to do the right thing for us. When they don’t, I feel betrayed. It’s not that big a deal, and I don’t go all binary on them. But the sense of betrayal demonstrates the depth of the bond.
So, IMO, WordPress made a mistake. The mistake definitely wasn’t making money. It was making money in a way that works against the interests of the Web community. As Shelley says, that doesn’t make the WordPress code any worse, and I may switch from Movable Type to WordPress at some point. Forgiveness is totally in order. Yet the abrading of joy does matter. [Technorati tags: wordpress burningbird google]
Matt’s response to the brouhaha is here.
March 29, 2005
Rebecca and Ethan are leading the Tuesday lunch session at Berkman. They’re explaining Global Voices, an attempt to crack open the little shells we live in so we can hear, well, global voices.There are all sorts of issues to be resolved: Internationalized software, free anonymous hosting, and identifying “bridge-bloggers” who “have feet in two worlds.” But, it’s getting going now. They even point out that there are instances when they’re getting international news via bloggers faster than the MSM; they’re developing a network of bloggers on the ground around the world.
The Global Voices wiki is here.
If you want to tag a post as relevant to Global Voices, tag it as “globalvoices” at delicious. [Technorati tag: GlobalVoices]
March 21, 2005
Google is hiring someone to work on a UI for blogging… (Thanks to Steve Garfield.) [Technorati tags: google blogs]
March 4, 2005
In an interview at CNET news, Federal Elections Commission chair Bradley Smith said:
“The real question is: Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.”
Omigod. Have we completely forgotten what democracy is about? Scary. (Thanks to Salon for the link.)
February 28, 2005
This Wednesday, I’m leading yet another in a series of discussions at the Berkman Center. This time the topic is:
Many of our metaphors about the Internet treat it as a place, which is perfectly appropriate. But many – or perhaps all – Net phenomena have a temporal dimension which is not “merely” metaphorical. For example, weblogs are able to become proxy selves because they have permanent addresses, IM’s distinguishing characteristic is that it’s interruptive of the now, and discussions are presented as threaded as a way to sort through overlapping chronologies. How else does time manifest itself on the Net? How is it different from real world time and our traditional conception of time as a series of atomic moments?
It’s open to anyone. And we serve pizza. Woohoo! Wednesday, 6-7:30pm, at the Baker House (map) [Technorati tag: berkman ]
February 26, 2005
Rael has coined a term: Shufflecasting:
Rather than downloading fully-formed podcast “shows” consisting of talk, music, and assorted sound-effects, I’ve been autofilling my Shuffle with an eclectic mix…
Rather than a “produced” full-blown radio show (the direction in which some podcasting seems headed), shufflecasting is more geek NPR meets Prairie Home Companion meets The Screensavers…
[Technorati tags: shufflecast rael ]
February 25, 2005
Gary Googlewhack Stock points out that Google no longer provides automatic links to the definition of search terms that end in S:
Nothing is delicious (11M pages). No one is anxious (6M). This may be because no one has a penis (24M). In apparent response to GOP fiscal irresponsiblity, nothing remains gratis (131M). Some fail to see the obvious (28M), that Genesis (16M) is not in conflict with physics (56M). Alas! (5M)
You know how when you search for, say, anxietyon Google, the light blue bar at the top reports that it’s showing Results 1-100 of about 16,900,00 for anxiety (0.55), and since “anxiety” is a recognized word, there’s a ink to a dictionary definition? If you search for any word that ends with an “s,” as in “anxious,” there’s no link.
Gary speculates, among other possibilites that “At Google’s heart, the regex !^(?i)[a-z]+\s*$ has lost a slash, banning all pluralization!”
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