Talked to Cory at the Green Muse about his vision for the back patio. It will be an Asian-inspired garden, with azaleas in pots, bamboo, and monkey grass. They’ll show films, and have “live music, of course.”
The front sign is being designed and constructed by Faith (?), who did the Blue Genie, Pieces of the Past, and a sculptural sign for a chiropractor of people raising their arms, bending, and touching their toes. Wonderful, playful things that make me smile, make the neigborhood nicer, and are good advertising, too.
At a table next to me, three women were preparing a photo shoot for a landscaping magazine.
I asked Cory about how he learned to garden. “You plant something and it dies, and you try to figure out why. It’s a slow process.”
Software is, well, soft
Tom Coates has something sensible to say about the “wikis are ugly” tempest in a teapot.
I think there’s a an underlying theme behind a lot of reviews of this kind and it’s a rather old fashioned idea of fixed and stable products. The Wiki is considered a thing that works in a way, rather than a rough accumulation of various versions of the same rough concept – each of which has some benefits and some failings. Each of which could be nothing more than the first stage in a longer and more fruitful path of evolution. Each of which could be stripped down to its core and integrated with other sites – small bits of meme DNA grafted into message-boards or weblogs or even more static editorial pages. There is no product to review with finality- there is no here here (as Gertrude Stein might have been misquoted). So we dig around and we take what we like and we make new things – some will bed down and spread, others will not. Many will be spliced with each other once more…”
My favorite Lazyweb ideas
From the Lazyweb Birds of a Feather session at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference.
GeoLocation that reminds you want you wanted to do when you get somewhere. I’ve always had a terrible time remembering things past context switches. It would be so cool to be able to add a geocode to a to-do reminder, which would pop up when you reached that location. This is probably hackable today, with a GPS-enabled PDA.
Cross-platform calendaring. Even better, decentralized calendaring. So I don’t need meetup to centrally organize my emergent meeting. I can have a blog-conversation, and can schedule a meeting or teleconference with people. Yes, let’s do lunch. My blog will talk to your blog.
🙂
A Network to Oppose the SDMCA
On Friday, there was a “Happening” (conference call+live chat) among grassroots groups opposing the SDMCA in different states: Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, South Carolina, Tenessee, and Texas).
We focused primarily on states where there are urgent deadlines on the legislative calendar. We’ll meet again this Friday, to recap the week’s event, provide support and ideas for other state groups.
A number of people on the call were eager to link together a national network of grass roots groups, to continue co-ordinated efforts on digital rights issues that play out at a local level. I think this is a fantastic idea. The more organized we are on the ground, the more our voices can affect local and national technology policy.
If you’d like to know more, about opposing the SDMCA, and/or discussions about bringing a network together, contact me directly, at alevin AT alevin DOT com.
Opposing the SDMCA
Last week, there was a surprise hearing on Tuesday night on HB 2121, the house version of the Super-DMCA.
We got the word at 5pm, confirmed at 6pm, and were in the hearing room at 6:30pm when the hearing started.
The MPAA lobbyists were in town. The committee waived the notice rule and put the bill on the schedule.
The bill finally came up at 1am after a set of utility regulation bills.
The bill was presented as a simple case of preventing piracy and theft of service. It sounded like the sponsor expected a quick hearing with an evident result.
The first people to testify were Vans Stevenson and Todd Flournoy from the MPAA in DC, presenting the bill as a minor revision of existing cable-TV piracy law. Stevenson presented the bill as an uncontroversial measure that had already passed in a number of states.
We spoke against, as did a representative for Verizon, opposing the bill on behalf of a coalition of telecom and ecommerce companies types. They were concerned with the bill’s breadth, since it might place them in the role of policing their customers’ communications.
During our testimony, we helped to raised doubts in committee members mind about the bill’s lack of clarity and excessive civil penalties. The representatives agree with the bill’s goal, preventing theft of internet services, but had not given thought to the negative side effects of the bill’s breadth and side effects.
We noted that as awareness of the bill’s problems had spread, there is now strong opposition in other states. Also gave examples of ways that the bill was having chilling effects on research (a Michigan researcher who’s put his thesis offshore) and on business in other states where it has passed (Labrea in Illinois).
Representatives Consumers Union and Public Citizen put in cards against the bill but didn’t testify.
The chair ended saying that the bill clearly needed a lot of work, and encouraging the groups in attendance to work on modifying the bill.
Since then, we’ve been talking with other committee members, explaining why this is not a good bill as it’s written, although the intent — preventing theft of internet services — is reasonable. And we’re working with other groups in Texas who are opposed to the bill.
If you want more information about opposition to this bill, please contact me directly, alevin AT alevin DOT com.
Journalers happy hour
So, I went to the journalers’ happy hour last night, following David Nunez’ testimony that they don’t bite.
Talked with Jette, of Celluloid Eyes, who did this brilliant impersonation of Prentiss Riddle, Greg Bueno, and several of Greg’s friends from Japanese class.
The group seems quite friendly and social. A good number of the social activities that I do seem to involve some flavor of work (I tend to start and/or organize things). It was fine to show up, hang out, chat, be friendly.
There are sub-cultural differences between journal-writing and blogging, although the lines among the genres are rather blurry. Online journal-writing is clearly a personal genre, whereas blogs can be more or less personal.
Journalers are pseudonymous but social, creating a set of nuances and ambiguities about level of personal disclosure. The social convention for journalers isn’t to have online comments, but to have conversation in a mailing list. The convention is also to use fewer links. The journalist stereotype of blogs is a series of journalistic comments upon hyperlinks.
Journalers (at least my impression from last night) do care about writing. The upcoming Journalcon will be described as online writers’ conference.
This piece, which is a first-person, impressionistic journalistic story, marks me as a blogger, I guess.
I also keep what could probably be described as an online journal, but it’s password protected. (If you know me and you’d like to subscribe, send me email, I’ll get you a password). I started it for a few friends who wanted more of the “gardening,” life-trivia stories, of which I publish a few on this weblog. I’m less brave than, say Mr. Nunez about writing about misadventures for the eyes of potential clients.
Are you social software?
I think SSW is a style of application, rather than a category of applications.
(from a discussion on the definition of social software, over at the mailing list)
Examples:
You could build a recommendation engine that was social software — such a recommendation engine would enable recommendees and recommenders to meet each other. If AllConsuming.net added a collaborative filter that showed blogs reviewing books that I was interested in, that would be a recommendation engine as social software.
You might be able to build a CRM system that was social software — if customers and salespeople were able to see the information, and collaborate with each other. By contrast conventional CRM systems are based on assumptions of structured workflow and hiding the sales-person’s intent from the customer. These assumptions are so deeply embedded that they’re hard to see.
from a response to Pete Kaminski.
All Categories are Local
Dave Sifry comments about the draft specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), proposed by Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower.
Dave is concerned that a category standard would fall prey to the problems of ambiguity and scamming that killed HTML META tags.
As I noted in comments on his post, Dave is absolutely right at the scale of the web or the blogosphere.
However, I think that categories will be much more valuable at the community level. For example, Austin has a meta-blog, aggregating posts related to Austin. People in other cities are starting to do the same. If we could map sub-categories, we would be able to create a cross-regional directory. There are local editors who keep the system from being spammed, and make decisions about how to map categories.
So, I think that the system can work in the context of defined groups and defined applications.
The only thing that ENT is missing is a way to alias categories — Austin’s “music events” maps to Ann Arbor’s “concerts.” Presumably this could be implemented at the application level.
Emergent Democracy: Theory and Practice
There was some hullabaloo last month, when Andrew Orlowsky made fun of the emergent democracy proponents as a bunch of techies who wouldn’t recognize politics if a ballot box fell on our heads.
In the real world, here’s how techniques of emergent democracy are being used in real live politics, helping activists combat the state-level DMCA. (An Orwellian bill which says that anything you do with your internet connection that is not expressly permitted by your ISP is forbidden.)
* I met the crew at EFF-Austin by going to a meet-up.
* Was alerted to the state-level DMCA by email from EFF-National
* Use Ed Felten’s blog the EFF website, and the Public Knowledge website to follow the bill’s progress in other states, share resources and network.
* Co-ordinate locally with a mailing list, and post local resources to a wiki.
* Work locally with the ACLU to inform legislators about the bills.
In practice, the emergent properties are more human and less AI.
* The net helps people with common interests find each other and get together
* Blogs, mailing lists, and wikis help people share and refine ideas
In practice, electronic channels interface with physical channels in traditional ways.
* Citizens visit, call and write legislators
* Supporters donate money to candidates
Over time, we may develop more sophisticated methods for aggregating conversation, enabling a broader and richer process of deliberation. Over time, the tools may be used for referenda and greater use of direct democracy.
The vision of the will of the citizenry, emerging from a million electronic messages, is science fiction today.
For now, emergent democracy enhances citizen participation in representative democracy.