Adina Levin's weblog. For conversation about books I've been reading, social software, and other stuff too.
Ross Mayfield analyzes the new generation of web-native online community tools :
which displace older models like bulletin board systems and usenet.
Jon Lebkowsky replies that much of the “new online community” is not so new.
We’re building new tools which are refinements of the old tools, and the social practices are clearly an extension of stuff we’ve done all along
There’s a set of bills in Texas, as well as SC, FL, GA, AK, TN, CO, and MI, that extend criminal penalties for cable piracy to the internet.
The bill is very broadly written, and could be construed to ban firewalls, NAT, anonymous email, and any number of other normal things you’d do with your internet connection.
EFF-Austin is working on this, in conjunction with other civil liberties organizations. We’re being quiet about it for the next few days.
More soon. Send me email if you’d like to know more.
Sam Ruby suggests using a thumb-rating system to train your blog aggregator to find more blogs you’d like.
Mark-Pilgrim-is-God has, of course already implemented this for his own site.
This could take advantage of opinion tags. Another good reason to implement opinion tags.
As long as we don’t call them thumb tags.
David Weinberger expressed great puzzlement over this ubiquitous Texas term, when in Austin for SXSW.
Fortunately, Prentiss Riddle comes to the rescue with a pronounciation guide, a definition from a Spanish-language guide to Aztecisms, and links to the wikipedia entry on Nahuatl (the language used by the Aztecs, from which we also get the words “chocolate” and “tomato.”)
Thanks, Prentiss.
This Josh Marshal article is very scary.
It describes a policy to pre-emptively reshape the Middle East, with Iran and Syria as the next targets, and Egypt and Saudi Arabia further down the road.
The US will find the whole Middle East as easy to control as, say, Israel finds the West Bank and Gaza.
Sheer hubris.
Read A Canticle for Leibowitz, after having it on the shelf for maybe a decade.
If you haven’t read it, it is an early and classic work of postapocalyptic science fiction, published in 1959. The main setting is a monastary, after civilization has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The book has three sections: the first set in the dark ages, when the monks preserve without comprehension a record of a technical civilization; the second set in a renaissance period, when society is starting to develop secular scholarship and aggressive, imperialistic political leadership; the third section is set in a rebuilt, high-tech civilization on the verge of destroying the world once more with nuclear weapons.
I liked the book as a work of art — the book builds a compelling and grim set of future worlds. Through those worlds, it explores a conflict between religion and science.
In the dark ages, the actions of the church are absurd. The monks revere every scrap of evidence from the fallen world, including the grocery list of the “blessed Leibowitz”. Leibowitz was a low-level engineer who tried to preserve technical knowledge when angry mobs try to destroy the people and knowledge that led to civilization’s destruction. He becomes a saint of the order, and there’s a bureacratic and absurd process of canonizing the “saint”. A simple and ignorant monk makes an illuminated copy of an ordinary blueprint circuit diagram, adding gold leaf, scrolls, shields, and curlicues.
But the book’s underlying philosophy is very Catholic; redemption through suffering; the values of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Despite the absurdity of elements of religious belief and practice, the author sympathizes with the monks. In the section set in the dark ages, he sympathizes with the simple monk, who suffers for his actions in discovering and preserving the mysterious ancient texts. In the section set in the renaissance, the author sympathises with the scholarly abbot, who sees the secular scholar character as a victim of hubris and a sellout. In the section set in the renewed technical civilization, he again sympathises with the abbot, who sees a secular doctor practicing euthanasia on victims of lethal doses of radiation as the self-deluded agent of totalitarianism and suffering.
I realized why I’d never gotten through the novel before. The first section is almost entirely without love and compassion. The main character is a simple, innocent, and ignorant fellow who is treated cruelly most of the time. It is hard to identify with the characters and hard to watch the cruelty.
The second two sections have more complex main characters, and some compassion in the interaction among characters. So it becomes easier to read, though the book on the whole is quite grim.
Individual characters suffer and die, humanity suffers from fatal hubris, the vultures have a great time.
According Salon Magazine, Clear Channel, the radio and concert behemoth, “barred protest groups from distributing literature at an Ani DiFranco concert in New Jersey — and threatened to pull the plug on DiFranco or anyone else who made antiwar comments from the stage.”
Clear Channel is trying to stop musicians and fans from speaking against the war, at the same time that they sponsor pro-war rallies.
Obviously their behavior is notorious. In the grand old Hearst tradition of yellow journalism, they’re flogging a war in order to sell add space. At the same time, they’re repressing anti-war speech.
But is this censorship? Censorship is typically construed to apply to government actions.
Does the concept of censorship also apply to commercial players who have overwhelming market share in a medium of speech? Or is Clear Channel free to make any business decision with their own property?
Clear Channel is the dominant player in radio. “Clear Channel owns over 1,200 radio stations and 37 television stations, with investments in 240 radio stations globally, and Clear Channel Entertainment (aka SFX, one of their more well-known subsidiaries) owns and operates over 200 venues nationwide. They are in 248 of the top 250 radio markets, controlling 60% of all rock programming.”
Clear Channel has enough market share in the radio industry to be able to silence musicians’ political speech at the cost of the musicians’ livelihood.
Do musicians have any recourse, other than to and make their living in another field? Do consumers and citizens have any recourse, other than to turn the radio off and not go to concerts?
Does freedom of the press belong to he who owns the press, over and out?
How he does it
(Offerings of fruit and flowers in Mark’s general direction)
http://nyholm.net/pcforum/tb.cgi/pcforum
PC Forum is running a lively conference wiki using Socialtext’s Nice Little Wiki.
The conference also has a trackback metablog, aggregating posts from PC Forum bloggers.
Folks are also fotoblogging using Fotolog and PreClick.
Social software is the next best thing to being there.
So, I’m participating in several trackback metablogs, and will probably help make some more.
Would love to be able to have a bookmarklet menu of trackback URLs to select from and paste into my MT blog entry screen.
The problem is, this crosses sites (the trackback URL, and my blog), so it violates a Javascript principle. Can anyone think of a way to hack this?