Syndicating comments

On an experimental MovableType weblog I’ve been playing with comments syndication. I would love to be able to subscribe to comments when I’m following a conversation, instead of manually pinging the weblog, and would be happy to syndicate comments feeds to others.
So far the “comments syndication” examples I’ve seen from Bill Kearney and Phil Ringnalda have involved syndicating all of the comments for a given weblog.
Instead I’d like to be able to syndicate and subscribe to a single conversation at a time — isn’t that how you particate in blogconversations?
I’m still futzing with it, will let you know when and if something works.

Can we own our personal information?

There’s an intriguing article by Kevin Bedell over at the O’Reilly site suggesting that we trademark our personal information. If we get legal protection for our personal data, then we can charge others for using it and restrict others from using it.
This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea to me — I always wondered why other have legal rights to our personal data and we don’t.
I’d love to see this idea batted around the blogosphere, vetted by the friendly lawyers, implemented in the lazyweb.

Politics and LOTR

According to the New York Times, Viggo Mortenson, who plays Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, wore a “No Blood for Oil” t-shirt on the Charlie Rose talk show to make it clear that the movie wasn’t US pro-war propaganda.
When I watched the movie, I did think about the danger of portraying the enemy as absolute evil at a time when our government is using the meme – er, bluntly, and portraying enemy armies as zombies when we have technology that removes soldiers far from the act of killing.
I hesitated to post this, since the political interpretations are more boring than the movie. The movie is fun as mythic fantasy; the idea of watching another movie in the series next time this year sounds promising at a time when the year ahead looks uncertain.

Smart Mobs #2 – community errands list

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book was about an errands marketplace.
A group of researchers in Eugene, Oregon experimented with a digital version of the community errands list; in which mobile devices negotiate about sharing tasks such as picking up dry cleaning, buying stamps at the post office, picking up a book at the library.
This is an academic research project, so it includes wearable computers using game-theory-based agent software to negotiate the exchange of tasks, using a system of points accounting for difficulty and distance.
The algorithm may be overkill; one can imagine a simpler, pub-sub, hackable version of this whereby people publish their errand list, and others can click off tasks. Perhaps with an Ebay-like reputation system and security levels if the group gets big enough. Might work for a block association or co-housing group or apartment building.

Smart Mobs #1

The Smart Mobs in Howard Rheingold’s book don’t seem so smart.
Swarms of people with mobile gizmos can mass to overthrow governments and on a smaller scale, co-ordinate dinner, or turnstile jumping, or soccer riots.
A Smart Mob can take down a government, but can it govern? The Seattle protesters were nimble, but their platforms weren’t that coherent (contrary opinions with pointers to cogent sources most welcome).
What processes for thinking and co-ordination are required to make decentralized action really smart, not just co-ordinated and impulsive?

The Two Towers

Saw the Two Towers yesterday, and enjoyed it a lot.
Good

  • The split personality of Gollum/Smeagol (even more effective in the movie)
  • The fact that the movie series gives the female characters more character than the books do.
  • Eowyn ought to be senior at Rohan when her brother cousin dies, her brother is exiled, and her father uncle is incapacitated; the book takes the medieval inheritance rules for granted, the movie sympathizes
  • As in the book, the bonding among the male characters (Frodo/Sam, Legolas/Gimli) (In the book, the heterosexual relationships weren’t credible at all; they’re better in the movie)
  • The New Zealand landscape
  • The ents (though their part is cut in the movie)
  • Characters that get unbearably prissy in the book (Aragorn, Frodo) are more bearable in the movie.
  • The dead marshes (“or Frodo goes down with the dead ones and lights little candles”).
  • Creepy Nazgul (though creepier in the 1st movie).Given the good job with Gollum and the Nazgul, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with Shelob.
  • The various elf-props (in the event of a water-landing, your elf-cloak will serve as a floatation device)
  • The strange and pleasant sensation of remembering events from the book as they happen in the movie
  • Most important — the sense of being in another world (though the movie can’t recapture the feeling of being fourteen years old, with a boring and subjectively miserable life, transported into a rich and complicated alternate universe.)

Not as good:

  • The episodic pacing is tougher to make work in a movie (as in the book; cuts between moody Mordor-route scenes; complicated Helm’s deep battle scenes, Merry/Pippin sublot scenes.)
  • As in the book the dialog has its clunky moments. After the first few minutes, though, I got caught up in the story and didn’t notice so much.
  • Sauron/Mordor as Ultimate Evil. As in the book, not credible. The internal struggles of the flawed characters are much more interesting.

Political blogging

I didn’t plan for this weblog to have quite as much political content as it does.
My personal feelings about these issues come from the fact that my dad is a holocaust refugee. The holocaust was taught in school and I went through a phase of reading everything I could find on the subject when I was twelve and thirteen. I read about people whose world gradually slid from civilized life to dictatorship to utter horror.
At that time, one of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was — if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up, or would I be one of the people who kept silent until life became unbearable.
When the government rounds up immigrants on excuses of incorrect paperwork, and is able to detain them indefinitely without evidence or trial, that rings very loud warning bells for me. When the government proposes systems and institutions to rummage through our private information, sifting for random evidence of wrongdoing, instead of doing careful police work, following up on leads, and getting warrants, I start feeling uneasy and afraid.
I’ve had several conversations in the last week with people who prefer blog writing that is original, personal, and from the heart.
I’ve been blogging the various government outrages this past week not particularly because I have anything original to say about them, but because this is one small thing that I can do to help make people aware. Also because I feel like I have to speak out, and this is one small place to speak. And because the mainstream media has started picking up on the top blog stories, this is one vote to move a story up the Daypop index, where the reporters who cover the zeitgeist will keep the story in the news.

Destroying the net while trying to protect it

Ratcliffe says:

This is sheer idiocy, because it will actually increase the risks to the national information infrastructure. From its inception, the Net was conceived as a distributed system that could reorganize around failures (in the case of the original designs, the Net was built to route around damage caused by nuclear weapons). Centralizing all network communications to facilitate surveillance will create a huge, ripe and easily attacked target, reducing the reliability and performance of the Internet on the whole and for each individual user.