jim and internet

i want to be a visionary

2004-07-22T11:34:00.000-05:00

On the inexorable march of history that will see the death of our current political situation:

No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

Alan Moore interview at Salon

IA and CSS

2004-07-21T16:15:00.000-05:00

First Things First: IA and CSS

Cool best practices presentation from Web Visions about doing good IA to do good CSS to make good, portable, usable, accessible web content.

Very helpful. Makes me wish I was going to teach that design course again soon. This would be two weeks.

dbf redesign

2004-07-21T16:04:00.000-05:00

Andrei is redesigning Design by Fire, and he's making some pretty daring choices, layout-wise. It's got a lot of negative space, but I don't ever find myself scrolling sideways (though I keep assuming there's something just off-frame because everything seems so open).

Looks great, and I'm watching how he puts more stuff into it. Great content, and the old design was good. It's been fun to watch this one change.

comforting

2004-07-21T15:03:00.000-05:00

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..." And we... kill those people.

"We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love."

-Bill Hicks
"It's Just a Ride" (video)

Manifesto for the Reputation Society

2004-07-19T09:59:00.000-05:00

done applying for a job. will blog again now.

It's definitely a manifesto, but it's very sharp and I would have paid money for the lit review.

from the conclusion:

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

newmedialiteracy

2004-06-29T11:01:00.000-05:00

Just Think!

I was reminded of this project when Lessig mentioned it in Free Culture.

Cool teachers doing good stuff with digital video gadgetry and busses. You can watch the video. Youth media.

Related (through Yanofsky, primarily... I think): Hidden Heroes Another video project, but not as broad.

wank: extended by F/911

2004-06-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in Cadillac, so I don't have much to think about now that I've seen Farenheit 9-11.

Necessary review disclaimers include:

I like Michael Moore just fine, but that's because I agree with him

In my uneducated opinion, Moore as a documentarian doesn't demonstrate a lot of respect for the people he's filming to make the political points I agree with, and that turns me off

I thought F911 was better than BfC, but only because it was a little more self aware and took more ownership over how ranty it was.

So, yeah. Watch it or don't. It's a moving portrayal of one man's interpretation ofwhat has heretofore been a pretty accessible section of the public record. No surprises.

What's more interesting is how this movie is going to come under fire for what it does with (and Moore will defend it according to) the facts. With the exception of the name of a business associate that was involved with the president during his military service, there weren't any real secrets told there that I hadn't ignored once or twice before. Moore arranges them in a really moving and filmic way that points a couple of very critical fingers and demands action from the audience in righting these wrongs.

What's interesting to me about this in relation to what I wanked about the other day is how little difference the facts make in this argument, and how little they'll come to matter throughout the whole controversy (unless Moore's critics have the foresight to shut up about the movie). If I remember the fallout from the last movie, arguments against the truth of Moore's claims didn't really involve whether or not Charleton Heston said something or didn't; they were more often about what montages Chuck was edited into while he was saying "From my cold, dead hands."

I now think about this in relation to stupid little things like my college buddies' last name and how I came upon it. The actual factual information that I possessed about them was pretty trivial and unhelpful, but it was enough for a savvy manipulator to fashion into a workable approach to a problem. There wasn't a lot of truth available in them, but it was easy to bring some to it with a judicious application of search string composition and leaps of faith.

I'm pretty sure Michael Moore proves this same kind of thing all the time: that facts are at best fungible as a source for authority and truth, at worst utterly useless except in service of skilled liars. I take the movie as proof that the facts themselves don't offer us much of considerable interest without some guiding opinion to help make sense of them.

I still kind of wish I'd gone to see Riddick.

lobe wank 6.22

2004-06-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

freewrite. don't follow.

Interesting experience during working vacation:

A dear friend of mine from college lives in Madison now, and since we were going to go through that town I thought "Oh, shit. I have no idea what Andrea and JP's phone number is." When I say I don't remember a phone number it means that the number in question isn't stored on my phone.

Things were more complicated by the fact that after I don't live in the same town as somebody for more than 6 months their last name disappears from my brain. Andrea Alexander (who I now remember became Andrea Nichols when she married JP) had no phone number in my phone and no name in my brain that I could use with a dead tree directory to find that number.

My solution was simple: sit down in a coffee bar with free WiFi and use my laptop to Google around with the data available to me:

Andrea is married to JP

they both went to Michigan State in Lansing

JP plays the violin

What I eventually came up with was a cached copy of an article that Andrea wrote freelancing for a Lansing alternative weekly about JP's band. That gave me his last name, which I could use as her last name, which was enough to get me her cell from Wisconsin's student directory.

No one can hide from me and the Internet.

More interestingly, I don't think I learn anything anymore. All I learn is a bunch of minimally related memorables that I can use the Internet to find intersections between. That gets me what I want, but it minimally takes the constant presence of my laptop and at least my cell phone too.

Good reasons to use web standards

2004-06-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

This stuff is all still way up for debate I think, but here Andrei Herasimchuk outlines some reasons to use web standards.

educated blogger

2004-06-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

I think I swore off blogging about blogging a couple of months ago, but I'm doing it now.

Curses.

Anyway, the thing currently within my focus (2 inches in front of my face) is finishing up the Dreamweaver course. Once that's complete, I start figuring out how I can help put technology into the Minnesota Writing Project's summer institute. Current idea is to use the UMN's new bloggy toy as part of their required reading and writing exercises.

The point of that institute, however, isn't just to push a bunch of crap down the throats of teachers. Anybody familiar with the NWP knows it's about teachers teaching each other by sharing spiffy and creative things that they've come up with for their own classes and schools, so we're taking a pretty open approach in working this into the institute. My plan currently stands as follows:

Get all the teachers signed up for x500 accounts (which they have because they're students at the U while they're signed up for the institute), and Uthink

Get everyone comfortable with posting, managing accounts/posts

Tell them "Blog!" and see how they handle it.

I can see there's kind of a hole there... There's only 15 or 16 people involved in the institute, so I'm praying there'll be enough creative humans to come up with fun ways to blog a reading group. We'll see what happens.

Reading:

The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom by David Huffaker: New. Nice and review-y. Too academic for people looking for practical lit?

Writing with Web Logs Again, nice intro. Not as deep as the Huffaker, which might be good

Reflective Collaborative Learning on the Web another FM piece, so it's academic and dry, also too old to have access to the word blog. Nice examples and illustrations of online collab, though.

Note: any teacher reading this that thinks they might know what 12-16 K-12 teachers might find interesting about playing with weblogs for three weeks should email me.

Spiffy bunch of CSS

2004-06-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

Stu's CSS Repository

Bunch of really great CSS demos here. Most of them are pretty bleeding-edge, so browser compatibility is iffy, but lots of great tricks for framing and page layout.

smartmob the vote

2004-05-28T15:53:00.000-05:00

They don't mention Rheingold, but the NYT has a short feature today about get out the vote efforts that are focusing on getting cell phone numbers of young voters that they can use for mobilization efforts on election day.

I have some experience with this from my only previous effort at political involvement. At the state house district convention that I was helping do data logging and analysis for, when our candidate needed extra support we worked extra hard to contact people on their cell phones. Unfortunately most people in Northeast Minneapolis are old, so that didn't get us as far as it might have in, say, Uptown MPLS or Manhattan, but we were doing the kind of just-in-time network leveraging.

Come to think of it, it seems a shame we didn't buy a bunch of bulk SMS for the campaign to send out at hourly intervals that morning... Damn. That's a good idea.

pausing to celebrate fiery, fiery music

2004-05-28T12:19:00.000-05:00

Toys that Kill are FINALLY available on the iTunes Music Store. I bought both albums and am listening to them and loving them as much as I knew I would.

I see all kinds of music live, but I BUY it almost exclusively from either shows or iTMS, and more frequently from the latter because when I'm at shows I need money for beer. Record stores are an artifact of my past, and every time iTMS get something that I love as much as Toys That Kill, I make a little sound.

distributed intelligence among cars

2004-05-28T09:52:00.000-05:00

This reminded me of the bit about pathfinding behavior in ants I posted a couple months ago...

Honda electric concept car that networks between machines to share traffic, obstruction... other data

Mmmmm... cars that become an Internet of knowledge about the road ahead... Driver responds to immediate threats or situations, while the car makes the turns to get where it's going. Bit of a leap of faith there, but it's fun to think about.

structure and behavior

2004-05-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

I don't read DWM enough. Last month I missed a great article about separating structure from behavior in a way similar to the way we separate structure from presentation. Great article about using pretty complicated parts of CSS that I haven't really learned yet.

Peter-Paul Koch: Separating Behavior and Presentation

explicit design

2004-05-24T21:48:00.000-05:00

Peter Merholz is working on what looks like his consultancy's mating call: Explicit Design.

I like what he's saying there a lot, and in a later post he applies this little ethic to explicit labelling.

Best part: explicitness has a way of managing user expectations, which means that if you can really make evident what you're trying to do, your users' expectations for function and signal will be more in line with you.

design eye for the usability guy

2004-05-24T18:20:00.000-05:00

A couple of web heads gave Nielsen the Queer Eye treatment to redesign his godawful (but totally usable!) page, step by step.

It's funny how they do it, and I love to watch people take shots at Nielsen, just because he hasn't changed his line much in the five years I've been reading his stuff, but the article is actually a really good description of a step-by-step revision of something multimedia.

Talking about this stuff is going to be fun in 3270, considering 3 of my 5 students are graphic design students, some of whom have done web work before. They're going to think I'm acting like Jakob Nielsen when I tell them to stop using Flash and tables for visual flair, but I have to try not to be him. This article is a great way to approach that challenge.

RSS gets UE torture it so richly deserves

2004-05-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

Matt Jones does some thinking of his own and points me to Robert Scoble doing some more thinking about RSS and how people use it and how it's designed.

I haven't read them very closely (yet), but as I understand RDF specs, they're written to keep site description and syndication very brief and easily machine readable. XML does that pretty well, but now that we've got a handful of RSS readers and people seem to be adopting the technology for lots of useful tech (Winksite, anyone?) it's time to take a look at the way we're designing RSS.

Partly that's just a design issue. I love the way I can read a full post from boingboing with the images and all in NetNewsWire. On the other hand, I hate the way the BBC News RSS gives me a title and a lede. That's me and my readers though.

More research, please.

tables my ass

2004-05-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

It amazes me that people still think this is an interesting conversation to have, but in the Tables v. CSS debate there's always been the "tables are easier" argument to fall back on when you insist that semantic validity, document structure, and backend flexibility aren't enough to make tables obsolete.

Patrick Griffiths makes a good pitch for CSS in addressing all of these in a nice, brief, convincing blog post.

surfacing

2004-05-20T17:56:00.000-05:00

oh yeah. I'm getting ready for Designing Websites With Dreamweaver (Rhet 3270), so designy linkage will be flying here again.

Praise Jesus. Praise Him!

jeremijenko

2004-05-20T17:08:00.000-05:00

And the prize for baddest ass in data viz and informatics apparently goes to Natalie Jeremijenko.

Is it art?

Is it the future?

Is it the future of art?

Neal Stephenson

2004-04-21T21:55:00.000-05:00

I wish I was Neal Stephenson

Not because I want to write novels, but because I want to be really smart and do all the reading he apparently does.

meeting people with your phone

2004-04-21T13:51:00.000-05:00

"Toothing" is an apparently British innovation wherein you set your handheld or BT phone to discover nearby devices, thereby discovering nearby people. These people, if you're lucky, might have sex with you.

It's worth noting that this is also the country that brought you "dogging," or large parties where people have anonymous and unprotected sex with strangers. It seems like a really good time to be in England if your idea of a good time includes risky but potentially consequence-free sexual activity... if those smut-peddlers at the BBC are to be believed, that is.

I don't know what it is about Europe, but they come up with the cool ways to use phones as far as I can see. All the PVP gaming technology I've read about for wireless devices gets its first significant adoption in Europe. Smart mobs there were smarter and bigger (though still stupid, despite how excited Rheingold got about them, but that's what's always characterized his work for me anyway).

It's as if Europeans are just way more likely to use their mobiles to meet new people. I sort of wonder if the iPod is the big portable Zeitgeist of the US... it helps you carry around boatloads of stuff that you probably stole and prevents you from being aware of your surroundings.

i would suck at this, because I think these are foolish

2004-04-19T15:09:00.000-05:00

Coolhunting is a profession that seems really appealing to me, though it's hard for me to imagine something I'd have a harder time gaining some credibility in. I have to say though, that the science of it (once it emerges and codifies itself) will be extremely flexible and productive. Look at what coolhunting sites do:

They provide single entry points where you can see what consumptive types are buying in their shoes, their outerwear, their music, their comics, their silkscreened shirts... the whole thing.

This is a cool way to surf culture... looking at shit like athletic shoes next to one-off screen printed apparel forces you to just sort of breathe an aesthetic in before you try to figure out how or why it works.

the voice of a generation's panties

2004-04-06T09:40:00.000-05:00

Bob Dylan is going to be in an ad for women's underwear

What I love about this is how much it's bumming out fans of his. I like him fine, but I'm starting to think that any celebrity who has fans that venerate them as some kind of saint or prophet should do this as a service. "You think what I do for a living is change your life? Let me show you what I do for a living."

If Tom Waits did this I'm pretty sure I would cry actual tears, but I'm also confident it would be good for me. Henry Rollins did me that favor when he started appearing in awful movies.

more data viz

2004-03-31T08:49:00.000-06:00

NEWSMAP visualizes the news via Google News and is SO FUCKING COOL that I think my nose just started bleeding.

so colorful it makes my pain hurt and go away

2004-03-30T16:21:00.000-06:00

Cool article here from the guys that designed Disney's Pop Century Resort. These guys want cities and institutional architecture to learn from the Strip in Vegas. They want us to embrace urban spaces where signage and structure are all communicative, which I think is so insane it's cool.

What is to come next? The urban complex that is a city rather than a resort—a vivid multifaceted place that pragmatically juxtaposes decorated sheds and ducks through signage and sculpture, civic and commercial content—all in the service of enhanced communication, the vital community-building tool of our multicultural era. This is what the Las Vegases and Pop Century Resorts are leading up to and what the Tokyo of today has essentially achieved.

is it just me or is Disney's corporate homepage the biggest example of fancyslownotworthit ever?

sexuality... Jodi O'Brien

2004-03-30T15:55:00.000-06:00

Had an opportunity today and last night to hang out with Seattle U. sociologist Jodi Obrien, who does a kind of sociology that I had previously thought was totally uninteresting. For some reason I had kind of assumed that sociologists concerned with critical approaches to networks were primarily like the sociologists I've already met that work on the Internet. That is to say, I thought they were methodologically bankrupt and at best good feminists/Marxists/futurists that were coopting a priveleged language of social science to bolster claims that weren't really addressed by those research methods.

Turns out that Professor O'Brien is SUPER SHARP and has a good handle on where sociology sits in relationship to emergent cultures and mediations. She's building off her pre-Net work on sex and sexualities to use the Internet to advance the discussions of roles, stereotypes and development in US culture. Cool stuff.

Abstract of her Center for Writing talk

The Production of Reality (not Net stuff, but cool-looking)

Nice to see somebody who's addressing the stupidity of early enthusiastic views of the Internet's ability to make identity free for all of us by building onto that sense with new metaphors and interpretations instead of (doing as I do and) dismissing it as naive and uninteresting.

I need to buy Web.Studies 2nd ed in spite of the fact that I hate their webpage.

k5 sponsorship trust system

2004-03-25T11:03:00.000-06:00

Kuro5hin isn't my favorite community site anymore, though it was for a really long time. The thing has always been an experiment in cultural democracy on a scale and with a faith that I don't think I've seen anywhere else. Regardless of how dull his community's (average) posts have gotten in the years since I stopped visiting regularly, Rusty and his crew are innovators in community moderation systems and they've got a new trust system to combat 'tardly behavior.

It'll be interesting to see how this effects 1) the discussions on the boards, because I expect they won't change (It should reduce the s:n there, but I imagine the character of the place won't change because of this), and 2)k5's ad revenue. My experience with Google Adsense is that people that consider themselves personally invested in the site and it's success click the text ads just to chip in. Dunno if they'll do that if they can't get an account. Sometimes I think this might be why LJ got rid of it's (clumsy, weak) sponsorship system.

User Sponsorship and Managed Growth

commentary is the usual k5 mix of levelheaded analysis and simian-libertarian political feces throwing, but it's worth perusing.

I'm going to go find my password and watch this thing come to life.

sterling rant

2004-03-16T13:09:00.000-06:00

This blog has two themes: network UE and the future. I'm working on a giant stack of books and online articles in order to try to come up with something interesting to say about network UE.

In the meantime, Bruce Sterling talks about the future from SXSW.

It's alarming to have Brazil as the world's most politically innovative country. Even Brazilians like to say that Brazil is country of the future and always will be. They've got a lot of things wrong.

stuff is happening in net traffic growth

2004-03-11T09:45:00.000-06:00

Long blog space has been the product of several vectors that I've been trying to wrestle into a meaningful nodal point. It's not happening, so now I just link them here in hopes that generating print will make my brain fire.

First, book: Because I read a little thing in Nature about how ants handle congestion, I got interested in emergent organizations and traffic control, so I started readig Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, and Software by Steven Johnson, which is good and I recommend it and if you know me you can borrow it.

Anyway, verdict: stupid systems do a pretty good job of organizing themselves to facilitate their work. Part of the reason for that is they have pretty straightforward goals, usually, but they're also extremely fault-tolerant and adaptable.

Okay. Internet.

One solution to congestion is to cache closer to the last mile, so that something doesn't have to travel across the world twice. MITTR article about the guys that are figuring this out.

Funny part: it looks like this is where the p2p guys are going to make all their money. First they generate enough traffic to change the paradigm under which last-mile networks are built, then they supply a cheap solution that extends the old paradigm rather than replacing it. Painless, costly, and shortsighted. Profit!

If I were an ant, I think I might call this stupid.

More:

Long-Range Dependence pdf

A characterization of P2P traffic in the backbone. pdf (looking at a different part of the problem)

page paradigm

2004-02-29T13:43:00.000-06:00

Mark Hurst talks about designing Web UE for users with a definite goal.

The page paradigm begins with one big assumption about Web users' behavior: They'll either click something that gets them closer to what they want or they'll click Back on their browser.

Implications:

1) This means users don't develop a consistent spacial picture of a website as they surf, which is troubling to some IA approaches.

2) Consistency isn't crucial as long as a path to a goal is clear.

3) If your users' goals aren't clear to you, you might be designing a useless webpage.

This is great, but I don't know how universally applicable it is.

noku-noku

2004-02-29T13:34:00.000-06:00

Japan Media Review: Wireless Report 2.29.04

Not much of an article here, but it's a passably interesting intro to some ways Japanese keitai use is torturing the voice out of cellular telephony. Good linky.

I love this. I hate talking on my cell phone, but I think text is great and I'm loving WAP more and more as some of my favorite blogs are using WINKsite.

the Hardrhyma

2004-02-26T12:54:00.000-06:00

Went to Chuck D's lecture last night. It was, uh, a tidge disappointing. Mistachuk, for all his skill as the a no-freestylin' emcee didn't come with much of a talk prepared. His delivery was great and he told some funny jokes and would occassionaly give us some insight, but mostly he just kind of rambled back and forth.

So, yeah, open letter to Chuck D:

You're my hero, Chuck. I want you to know that above all things. I think you put your money, your art, and your body on the line for the things you believe in and I wish there were more people in the world like you. You educate people with music, and you do that full time. There aren't a lot of people that can do that for the size audience you can do it for, so your work matters a lot.
Seriously, ventures like Rapstation.com and Slamjamz are nontrivial contributions to changing the culture of artistic production in this country. Fine Arts Militia makes excellent hip hop music. PE is the only hip-hop music that I can say not only sounds good and is enjoyable, but also counts for something.
That said, Chuck, if you're going to stand up in front of 1000 educated people in a university, it might behoove you to get some talking points down. For a super-intelligent human being who prides himself on writing and rehearsing his rhymes rather than just freestyling and relying on cliches, I was a little disappointed in the talk. You had some great points, and I fully appreciated what you said, but a lot of us walked away from there wondering whether you had something to tell us.
Your fan,
JIM

Grey Day Obfuscation

2004-02-23T23:29:00.000-06:00

...edit
Link's down now. You hopefully know somebody who "owns" this album now. Just go to downhillbattle and learn what the next step is.
.../edit
Also, while I have your attention, I'd like to turn it to a good deep house and funk set from Finland by Sam & Gigi. That's nearly 5 hours of DJ music there.

Also, mperia is a cool thing.

I could go on, but I won't. Pirate culture.

grey tuesday

2004-02-20T00:45:00.000-06:00

Grey Day Protest

If you lack DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album, bookmark this page and come back Tuesday. I'm going to be participating in this protest.

Why: What Dangermouse is doing is a celebration of the material EMI is "protecting," not an exploitation of it. I think Jay-Z is hilariously overrated and I really, really hate the Beatles, but this album is very good. This guy takes all the things I don't like out of each artist's work and has made me rethink how much I hate them individually by putting them together and forcing me to hear things about them that did not exist in previous listenings.

The Grey Album doesn't threaten EMI's monopoly on that material, and they don't deserve a cut of his action just because they own the masters of those albums.

bnetd memo with delicious torture of trademark holders

2004-02-18T16:51:00.000-06:00

Blizzard Presents No Evidence Of Actual Dilution

trademark stuff has gotten much more interesting to me lately because it's become a way that IP holders can close of PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE FAIR USE, because they don't want people thinking of things that they should have thought of first but failed to.

what we have here, is a very readable (considering) brief on what a stupid approach trademark infringement is when it's applied to people that reverse engineer a debatably competing product.

I love boingboing

golf clap.

2004-02-18T08:58:00.000-06:00

Suing the RIAA for racketeering is an idea whose time has come.

This is, humorously, going to go down in a hail of legal gunfire, but I love the method. IP wonks have been giving this same idea the pop gun treatment since Napster, but this is the first time to my knowledge that anybody's brought charges. Hopefully applying terms like RICO to RIAA behavior will give the "systematic fleecing of culture producers and consumers" meme some legs.

new comment widget

2004-02-17T17:44:00.000-06:00

Okay. Lets see how this goes. Again.

just like other kids, only up for grabs

2004-02-17T12:10:00.000-06:00

Golden boys and girls

Market liberalisation in China has, after 20 years, begun to create the middle class 18-35 market that has driven personal tech and IP development in the West since the 70's. Why is this interesting? 2 reasons:

1) Despite lots of reasons for the opposite to happen, China's economy has been growing almost too fast. This is developing brand- and fashion-awareness on a scale that hasn't been part of that consumer culture before.

2) Youth market consumers in this country aren't brand-neutral culture virgins, but they are new to the Western practice of spending money they don't have and mortgaging their future. In a culture where families don't emancipate themselves from one another when children develop their own earning power, that's got the potential to wreak some interesting havoc.

There's further West than you, Uncle Sam.

"emotional design" as sideband improvement to usability

2004-02-12T23:14:00.000-06:00

Apparently Donald Norman has had something of a change of heart. He's not so much into things being successful because they're usable anymore, so much as he is into things that are successful because they emotionally resonate with consumers. I had heard about the book, but I thought it was about design in sort of a different sense. I had also ignored the article. Now that Cory Doctorow went to the trouble of taking notes during his talk at ETCon, I went back and read the article and the notes.

I will be skipping the book. Norman found feng shue. Big freakin' deal.

Things that are pleasing to the eye help us work better because we're happy to use them and don't feel as stymied when they fail? Gee, thanks Dr. Norman. I'm very interested in the poorly thought-out philosophical arguments of large-breasted women. We'll call my theory Busty Argumentation. My book will sell millions.

Seriously... Prove to me that people can experience beauty in usability and I'll be surprised and impressed. Prove to me that beauty IS usability somehow and I'll give you the $600 you want the next time you come to town.

I think Norman and his partner the boring Dane have been taking too much flack for too many years about how one-sided and lame their ground-state theories are. Nice to see somebody in that crew is picking up the slack, but I'm not really impressed.

mobile phone SNS stuff

2004-02-12T12:19:00.000-06:00

PDF of a PPT, but it's a historical and light theoretical look at mobile phone SNS nifty.

i wish, for the first time, that I was in California

2004-02-11T19:33:00.000-06:00

The O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference is hauling ass. It kills me that there's no way I ever could have gone because, really, it looks like an intellectual paradise that may never be recreated. They are not putting papers online because they hate me enough to hold their conference in San Diego, plus they delight in my pain, so they're keeping secrets.

notes. best I can do.

Cory Doctorow notes "Google is harder than it looks" eye opening.

Danah Boyd's socio/techno hacking talk re: User Experience "Revenge of the User"

O'Reilly put up a Wiki for peopel to post their notes. Sort of cool.

has anybody seen my foot? why does my breath stink so bad?

2004-02-09T12:15:00.000-06:00

Funniest part? The first time posted this I meant to align this thing right and forgot some quotes and broke the HTML. Still, I didn't do that while I was buying OSDN adspace.

this is how we reengineer the culture we failed to create

2004-02-09T10:24:00.000-06:00

NARAS, in another attempt to clumsily find a middle ground with digital consumers, has put up a hilarious site called "What's the Download." whatsthedownload.com

Besides being the stupidest domain name ever, t's a good piece of shorthand for every mistake they make on that site. "We know what you want because we've been telling you what you want for 40 years. Now we're going to tell you how you want to get it and what you want to do with it once you have it." I bet they never link to Magnatune in their "LabelWhore of the Week" box.

Magnatune understands something that all this recordlable handwringing ignores: the technological innovations that make all this piracy happen means that distributors need to find a way to monetize the way people want to interact with music now, or they're going to find themselves chasing pirates forever while they prop up an obsolete method of exploiting artists, audiences and retailers.

Artists do not require distributors to make art, only to make money with art. They require a system that helps them support their art habit. Magnatune does this without using debt to force more art.

all rights to all things, forever and always

2004-02-08T14:01:00.000-06:00

More crap about Orkut (which I'm on now, and have discovered is basically a Frankenstein's monster built from parts of Yahoo! Personals and other SNSes).

Evidently the Register has tipped us all off that Orkut is some kind of highly goofy intellectual property mine for its lords and masters. The terms of service say the following:

By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials."

Cripes. That sounds like a joke, but I'm reading it right in there.

okay

2004-02-06T14:13:00.000-06:00

Comment This went down again. When a service sucks, I don't blame someone who's providing a service for free, but I'm not going to continue being a load generator for that system.

Comments gone again. Sorry.

soc networking privacy inquiry

2004-02-05T10:53:00.000-06:00

Roger Clarke has a nice, broad paper overviewing some of the privacy issues in SNS, though his conclusion is a little more executioner-style than I might have wished.

"In general, people would be well-advised firstly to stay well clear of all address-book and 'social networking systems', and secondly to prevail upon their friends, colleagues and acquaintances that they should avoid making any data about them available to service-operators like Plaxo."

Very Black 'Little Black Books'

Good review of obvious problems, good introductions to nonobvious problems. Basically this continues the past two years' rock and roll that its hard to increase both social connectivity and interaction potential without also compromising privacy. On one level, this isn't surprising (since you can't make friends without introducing yourself and thereby compromising your anonymity), but guys like Clarke and the EFF are right to separate these problems into the "stalker" category and the "irritating spam bot" category. Two markedly different problems with, I hope, a mutually exclusive set of solutions.

betamax principle

2004-02-04T21:50:00.000-06:00

The EFF has, to the extent that I can see, a comprehensive library of their case defending Grokster et al. against MGM's appeals against the Sony Betamax defenses. Very valuable.

http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/

Even audio of oral arguments. Very interesting.

... for I am merciful

2004-02-04T14:48:00.000-06:00

I have heard your pleas and have set up a comment widget on this blogger thing. I will not, for the forseeable future have the time or the energy to set up the MT blog that I want to make my own, so Blogger will have to do for longer. For this reason, and because I am tired of your bitching, I have implemented Comment This!.

You will now be silent on this issue in my presence.

First time somebody says something stupid, or this gadget gets spammed, party's over.

TV supercolliding

2004-02-02T23:18:00.000-06:00

All reality television is the same on a level that I wasn't aware of before. I watched some TV last night and I saw Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

It occurs to me that that show is like the other one, Fear Factor, only it's for guys like me. I ate some bugs once and I don't think I'd have trouble bungee jumping or whatever, but I do not tell a lie when I say that I actually changed the channel a couple of times because I couldn't watch what they were doing on this show. They shaved his back after they put goop in his hair. The thought of someone invading my home, eradicating my squalor, then doing the exact same thing to my body makes my skin crawl. I don't know why they make the guys that do it gay other than to leave the show open for the following joke: Queer Factor.

The clothing guy is funny though. I really get a kick out of that flaming schtick. It's the blackface of the 21st century, but I can see the art in it.

-the above was edited

Webfountain

2004-02-01T12:32:00.000-06:00

IBM Almaden continues to put the whole web under a big glass bell. Soon they will hopefully allow us to say out loud (using ViaVoice, probably) "Computer, show me pornography that conforms to 'recently rejected' arousal parameters."

IEEE Spectrum article on WebFountain analysis engine

Almaden's project homepage

world to Real Networks: We fucking hate your guts

2004-02-01T11:17:00.000-06:00

BBC demonstrates their integrity by making a deal with Real that lets BBC users avoid Real's pandering and deceptive download pages.

Car Talk actually makes a point of notifying Real that they think they suck while they switch to WiMP.

roboethics conference

2004-01-30T12:49:00.000-06:00

I should probably just abandon this enterprise and let Bruce Sterling do my blogging for me.

Anyway, there's a bunch of hilariously machine translated but still interesting abstracts for the First International Symposium on ROBOETHICS

I'm looking into finding some of the presenters' work, but not much is available in except for things I'm not interested in. It's a nice list of names of people doing interesting things though.

more logo torture

2004-01-27T12:21:00.000-06:00

Cool experiment in Austria's level of logo meme burn-in

monochrom's attempt to evaluate the actual power of brands by making Austrian people draw a total of twelve logos (nine international, three typically European) from memory, 25 people per brand. Salut, share of mind!

logo trends

2004-01-25T15:56:00.000-06:00

15 trends in US logo design

Does Graphic Design USA do stuff like this to stimulate innovation (This is what everybody's doing), or to assist designers in getting logos bought (This is what's selling)?

AFT

2004-01-25T12:53:00.000-06:00

About Fucking Time.

another one

2004-01-25T12:49:00.000-06:00

Oh, look. It's another one. After Friendster, Tribe, and a very similar bit of functionality in Livejournal, Deadjournal etc, there is now Orkut.

What's different about this one? An affiliation with Google, as far as I can tell. That means it's fast (which will kill Friendster... of course, Friendster was faster in beta than it eventually became), but as far as I can tell it isn't anything new.

What's missing about these things? Why do people stop caring so quickly? Livejournal abandoned a trust model and it got bigger, but doesn't seem to have changed all that much. Tribe hasn't changed much (that I've read about... I haven't experimented with it myself), but I think Tribe gets further on cool since it doesn't revolve around a dating service model for connecting people.

If anybody reading this is a member at Orkut, invite me. I wanna watch this one deteriorate.

connectivity economies

2004-01-24T11:47:00.000-06:00

Starting to see some cool research applications of the IBM Almaden graph structure study.

On the economy of Web links Rational actor models of human social behavior are always strangely unhelpful in predictive application, but this is a more rigorous investigation of how microcontent connectivity gives a network a discernible shape.

The most interesting thing about this stuff is that Google is not only evidence of the Web's shape, but an instrument in the shaping of it at the same time. miserable failure, blah blah blah.

Who searches "miserable failure" anyway?

"Show a little decorum, please..."

2004-01-22T23:01:00.000-06:00

Today is the 16th anniversary of the suicide of my favorite politician, R. Budd Dwyer. Tip one back and pray that whoever represents you in government realizes what they're doing and follows Budd's lead.

This is the way I think politics in this country should run all the time.

speaking of good at the Internet

2004-01-20T11:43:00.000-06:00

I got my name on the front page of Boing Boing's link-fu battle. Honorable mention in that contest means, I think, that you found something nobody had seen before but nothing that would make anybody's breakfast return to their mouth.

I vow to do better next time. I linked to a video of a crab encountering a very high pressure gradient under 6000 feet of water.

Seriously... finding something weird on the Internet that Warren Ellis or Susannah Breslin haven't already seen and linked to from their sites is like looking for an Amish you can pay for sex; you know there's got to be one, and you know somebody found him/her before you did... but boy howdy is that shit well-hidden.

new outlet

2004-01-20T11:24:00.000-06:00

I'll be posting on Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)'s PMjA Daily. Newsy stuff. Less 'Net crap than here and maybe more writing. We'll see how the outlet shapes up I think. Fritz hasn't given me any goals, so I'll make my own until I'm told I'm not good at the Internet.

Fritz and Dave are fun guys and I like that I get to share their sandbox.

I actually do celebrate

2004-01-19T20:39:00.000-06:00

It's become a tradition for me over the last three or four years to spend a few hours observing King day by doing some web research and listening to his speeches that are replayed throughout the day. This is the first year I've looked over the publications of The King Papers Project. I have to admit that I find it a little offensive that all this material hasn't been released into the public domain yet (The King Center does important work and I'm sure this is a non-trivial revenue stream for them, but still...), but it's the kind of thing that people should go spend a couple of hours perusing at local libraries.

As a person who characterises his lifetime political goals as "living long enough to have a hand in the inevitable death of the American Monoculture," it shocks me that I can still find some inspiration rereading King's letter from a Birmingham jail.

There are a couple of teachers that read this blog, and I suggest that they investigate the KPP's Liberation Curriculum.

2004-01-18T13:59:00.000-06:00

more languagepanic journalism
Jargon finding way into the classroom... and that's scary because, uh...

I laugh at this harder seeing it come from Florida, which I'm convinced is a place built for people that couldn't hack it anywhere else. Cuba a little rough on you? Try Florida. Too old to live someplace that has seasons? You'll love Florida. Are the words used by educated professionals ones that you don't use? Live in fear, but do it in Florida.

2004-01-17T18:41:00.000-06:00

wound man

One of the earlier remaining first aid quick references, apparently. "Wound Men" were illustrations of what a given weapon might do to a person. Brought to my attention by Edward R. Tufte in Visual Explanations.

Fun to compare to a more current example: The Navy's picture of what a .357 bullet does to the human body:

2004-01-17T15:29:00.000-06:00

tools
via dph

Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

eActivism... fine. Still, a practical and interesting list of tools for use on the Internet.

2004-01-17T15:01:00.000-06:00

moving house: progress report

I may have located a host with whom I will exchange money for bandwidth.

http://www.fuitadnet.com/

Am also considering Drupal as an alternative to MT. Those with experience should email me and tell me why that's genius or foolishness. Drupal seems to be a fancier content manager with mightier RSS gadgetry. This strikes me as a good thing to get to know.

2004-01-16T12:51:00.000-06:00

Privateer pressure in the oncoming trade war
I honestly thought that Lessig was going to lean back a little bit and go softer after getting hosed by the Supreme Court in an admittedly uphill battle. I don't think I've ever been so overjoyed about being wrong. Turns out, the guy's still got his teeth bared and is coming up with better ideas all the time. There's a lot of work to do to make sure that his defeat doesn't submarine IP liberalization in this country, but he's out there doing it. Even though many do, not enough people read his books.

Here he points out that there should be tit for tat in the unfair trade practices of the United States. You unfairly subsidize farmers to keep our produce off your shelves? Fine. We're having a blue-light special on pirated Disney DVDs. Free Microsoft Office when you buy any three pieces of American intellectual property of equal or lesser value.

2004-01-16T08:56:00.000-06:00

"the year big media lost its grip"
Warren Ellis' new artbomb.net column

"The failures of big media lay in their death-clutch on the old game, where we take what we're given and like it.

"We don't. And so we head off in a million different directions, following the dictates of our own unique set of interests. The old consensus block is broken up and shared across a hundred channels, two dozen radio stations, the dozen films the multiplex serves up each week, and the vast array of internet-based materials."

Ellis knows, by God. He knows. Most of what he does is very good, and he employs an impressive number of outlets to get it out to his slavering audience. More artists like this guy, please.

Fuck Bruce Springsteen's "57 Channels and Nothing On" crap. If I get one channel I like out of those 57(00... little update to the lyric), not only do I win, but so will the artist. The more I see of Britney Spears, the more urgently I feel the need to send money to Sam Logan or those mad geniuses in Ann Arbor, PoorMoJo's Almanac(k).

2004-01-15T23:20:00.000-06:00

the web ate me today
Familiar stranger conversations through Kate's livejournal, combined with some digging for other tech that leaps from psych research somehow got me to Xeni Jardin's site, which mentioned Rotten.com ... a place I haven't been to in a while, so I went there.

And wouldn't you know it, they brought me back to psychology via the Rotten history of lobotomised actress Frances Farmer.

There are more stories about this woman on the Internet than I can even link to here. Fascinating.

I'm on the Web too much.

2004-01-15T22:30:00.000-06:00

puter for nothing means puter for all
I've been idly interested in the Simputer since it started showing up on Slashdot in 2000 or 2001, and it finally looks like demand, supply and felicity have united to get somebody to buy the damn things and start throwing them around India. It's about time. The folks involved in this tool (and the projects that will hopefully implement it) really think that if you put the technology in people's hands, it'll help change their lives and their society. I don't know if that's true, but I love the thought of the poor and illiterate having computers.

There are those who think that this kind of bridging the digital divide will finally give us real democracy. That's a bit much I think, but it would be nice if there were more people around to break things info-wise. The cyberpunk that I am just loves to imagine that kind of chaos on the creative/information level.

Anybody who studies UI should be falling all over themselves to get to India right now. Can you make an interface that improves literacy without making the machine a pure learning tool but rather making it useful in its own right?

More articles

2004-01-15T12:48:00.000-06:00

reverse brain drain... uh, brain clog... i guess
via Bruce Sterling

"Our only hope is to strengthen our creative economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the ones we're losing. That will require taking on the Washington lobbyists who put the fix in for established industries at the expense of emerging ones. Millions of new jobs in the wireless networking field, for instance, could be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled by TV networks and the military, could be freed up. When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate talk about that?"

This piece is about domestic politics and uses the term "creative class," which would ordinarily disqualify it from things I might term not breath wasted, but the fact is there are interesting economies at play here. Globalization is apparently a one way street, and once the rest of the world starts following you you can duck into an alley, but you can't turn around.

Come to think of it, this article explains why I don't pay much attention to presidential politics anyway: they sell themeselves on issues that have nothing to do with the future unless it's some dogshit that has to do with colonizing the moon. News flash: NASA is not the only GO into which we can pour money and out of which will pour innovation. If we gave that kind of money and attention to the USDA I'd be eating meals of immortal vat-grown super kelp through my hair by 2015.

2004-01-14T14:50:00.000-06:00

revision
the teenage ambiguity and contradiction meme employed to mock Nussbaum below isn't mine. It's Pat Kane's from when he talked about MTV in the Sunday Herald. I was employing his combination of attention deficit and contradiction without really realizing it. Don't want to forget who the groundbreaker is, so I update.

You want a media (read: meta) journalist that's got a full set of intellectual teeth in his mouth? That's the guy. His approach is all about play (like kids do... not like semiotic-type play), but his work isn't all about having fun. Extremely insightful. That blog is the ill shit.

2004-01-13T23:28:00.000-06:00

CSS helps me trick people

 table {display:none;}

2004-01-13T22:51:00.000-06:00

blogs and social connectivity

Dieter's brief comment this morning got me reading the Nussbaum article from this Sunday's NYT Mag (fake registration accepted). It's an uninteresting article approaching an uninteresting technology from a point of view that holds absolutely no value to me. "Who will think of the children" is perhaps the surest way to lose my attention, but Nussbaum is a typical NYT journalist: long on writing talent and shockingly short on insight. Below are some thoughts on the thesis of her article - that teenagers' blogging is full of contradictions.

First, and easiest: teenagers are full of contradictions, and therefore everything they do is also. They put journals online because they want their private thoughts validated because they don't want people to know they're having private thoughts because they want people to like them for who they are privately because who they are privately fits right in with the cool group of kids that gets all the sex. Your article is a tautology and has taught us nothing. Anxious to see your piece next week. Thanks.

Further: These contradictions are a product of a mind that, by her own admission, did not grow up with "cellphones, or answering machines; [for whom] there was no ''texting,'' no MP3's or JPEG's, no digital cameras or file-sharing software." As someone who didn't grow up with this stuff but whose balls dropped as they were dropping, I can say that blogs are a perfectly logical extension of all of this. New ways to put yourself in the homes of your friends and bring your friends into yours; further ways to destabalize that boundary in the first place.

Odlyzko famously declared that "Content is Not King", and I think he's right, and all the important points Nussbaum misses proves it. She is made uncomfortable by the contradictions in what is presented in all this stuff - how communication is instantly transactable but possibly eternally enduring, or how stories can be intensely personal but broadcast to potentially the entire planet. This is missing the point because people do not crave information about your day or your love life. The article makes the mistake of bothering to read all the garbage that's being written in these things. Content, in all things, is comparatively ubiquitous and free. What's interesting is how frequent and how important all this reading and writing is and whether teenagers (who are always and only engaged in the construction of themselves as powerful and interesting people from an undifferentiated mass of id by seeing what makes them more powerful or interesting and what makes them less so) are dying because of or in spite of it.

Blogs provide that kind of transactional immediacy and propositional bandwidth. The use teenagers make of it seems to me to be merely teenaged. When we can control the color of our mutochromatic clothing, that'll be the next thing, and journalists will be confused by why teenagers are constantly shifting their clothes from transparent to black. It's because they're idiots learning to be something else, but they need to try out contradictory statements to see where the truth lies. Technology just allows more turnaround on more experiments.

New rule: no more blogging about blogs, even if there's an interesting way to approach it, which there isn't ever.

2004-01-11T18:11:00.000-06:00

want to move house
blogger proved to me that this could be a productive exercise. Now I've outgrown blogger and want to be able to search back posts, enable and disable comments and also give myself some space to play with images. This means MT and some paid-for space. Blogspot's good for free, but I'm not looking to pay for the (cheap and fun) service they provide.

If you know a host that is reasonably priced, has a good bandwidth cap and overage system and offers shell accounts as a default or a cheap option, email me. Service matters too.

2004-01-10T13:03:00.000-06:00

more of this, please
I would not be sad if drive-through radio hijacking became an epidemic in this country. Not merely because the drive-through fast food represents two of the biggest substance abuse problems Americans have and I like to see it get fucked with, but because it will produce some high-quality comedy.

Teenagers of America, I say to you "Get down to Radio Shack and get a scanner and a soldering iron!"

2004-01-10T11:12:00.000-06:00

This will be good for my current project, which is faceted like a bowling ball
via iaslash

very clear and practical article on using faceted classifications for web data. This guy also did a nice annotated bibliography on faceted classification. I didn't realize this literature was as deep as it apparently is.

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web by William Denton

2004-01-08T09:59:00.000-06:00

pretty soon I'll have a credit history... unthinkable
I don't think I can take it anymore.

Red Labor is about to make me get a PayPal account. After all these years I've finally been overcome by a company that sells great art on one of the best-designed web pages I've ever seen.

2004-01-08T09:33:00.000-06:00

soc viz
Marcos Weskamp's Social Circles

more tech to help you augment your perception of your social connectivity. kind of a weak demo, but it's an interesting concept to be able to shoehorn into Flash.

2004-01-07T09:52:00.000-06:00

with apologies to the band, though I imagine they'd see the humor and would approve.

2004-01-07T01:32:00.000-06:00

like searching for a needle in a pinstack
The last two times I've taught rhet3401, it's bugged me that I haven't spent any time in class talking about porn.

Understandably, this is a difficult thing to approach from a pedagogical standpoint, especially when a fair number of your students are non-traditional students who are (by my self-centered snap judgement as an overeducated and underemployed bachelor) "family types." I grind my teeth every time I read "the Internet is dangerous because of the porn. We have to think of the children." That strikes me as wrongheaded because the Internet is defined by porn in a lot of ways. Adult content popularizes a lot of delivery methods, data encoding conventions and pricing models. There's no other sure or even reliable way to make money on the Internet. No other consumer content industries take up as much bandwidth as pornography-hell... I've heard ALL OTHER consumer content industries together don't take up as much bandwidth as porn.

How the hell can I not talk about this stuff?

I'm no prude, but the trouble is, a lot of my approach to that class has been "Go check out some blogs|games|chats and report back to us by comparing what you saw to what the readings indicate." I don't know if I want to do that with porn. Actually, I want nothing more than to do that with porn, but I think it would be a mistake. I've had people refuse to read articles before for just talking about sex.

Anyway, next couple days of web-wading will be searching for porn stuff on the Internet that I can somehow turn into an interesting and inclusive social science discussion over a message board whose participants range in age from 18 to mid-50's. I expect this to be the hardest thing I've ever done. It's a little confusing already. If you have some links to research that doesn't take all the porn out of porn talk, please email me.

The tip of a somewhat intimidating iceberg. Really, this is a fascinating thing.

I wonder what Aurora Snow did to set her apart as Female Performer of the Year at the 2003 Adult Video News Awards.

2004-01-06T13:59:00.000-06:00

fits me like a glove
professional rhetoricians talking to professional HCI people. It's so cutting-edge they had to make up a word to fit it (one, crucially, that doesn't really mean anything that the word 'rhetoric' doesn't already).

Captology: The design and study of persuasive technology.

I feel like a jerk for noting this, but that site takes a pretty severe credibility hit in my eyes for having been created using some of the more amateurish tools in Dreamweaver and using HTML 4.0 in 2003. Some good research though. Stanford, can I come over and play?

2004-01-06T10:48:00.000-06:00

so this is why Qwest is testing VOIP now
Internet traffic growth: Sources and implications (pdf)
"The main imperative for carriers is to increase usage. They do need to obtain enough revenues to cover their costs and make a profit, but they cannot hope to do so unless traffic keeps up with technological progress. They will need to sell data connections on the basis of advantages of speed, and will need to emphasize flat rates (dependent on bandwidth) as a way to stimulate usage."

Odlyzko never surprises me, but he does the kind of work I wish I was smart enough to do.

2004-01-06T10:36:00.000-06:00

impressive
the inspiring web design blog of Dan Cederholm

Standards, simplicity and impressive web services.

2004-01-04T18:07:00.000-06:00

note: not Mitnick's "engineering". that's actually just called lying
more on social connectivity

"As an adjunct to the rise of the Internet as the primary emporium for information and interaction, seemingly hundreds of social networking experiments are being launched, trying to make the subtle and intuitive social dance that we call networking explicit and perhaps more straightforward."

Cracking the Social Code
followup: The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking

2004-01-04T18:03:00.000-06:00

lo fi

Ellis mentioned lo-fi communication and usable web design in two rants that came through the Bad Signal yesterday. This is of interest, as he used his right hand to take Nielsen to task for trying to excise the aesthetic from info design and used his left to talk about what works so great about old-fashioned broadcast email (like he does with the Bad Signal). Anyway, got me thinking. Got me reading. Tools and issues. Riff on:

It is an incontrovertible fact that Nielsen makes bad webpages. He's not a compelling writer, and there's nothing on the page for your eye to see other than his dull text. The thing that offends me most about what he does though, is that he seems to think UCD is all about remving obstacles. Fine, but if the information you're presenting is as compelling as, say, a Jakob Nielsen article, the first obstacle you should remove is probably the article.

better:

Tibor Kalman

Mark Bernstein is one of the few remaining people that actually manages to use the word "hypertext" without sounding like a retard. Good article at alistapart.

iaslash.org is helpful

anyway... more later... I'm on a new thing.

2004-01-02T12:45:00.000-06:00

bet that didn't take long
"The deadliest incident was a fire that gutted a firecracker store at a market in Lucena city southeast of Manila on Wednesday."

living in Manila means living on the edge, apparently

2004-01-02T10:59:00.000-06:00

You are what you intersect
The soul in Haitian Vodou:
"There is an important suggestion in all of this about what the soul really is: it seems to subsist not just in something inside a person, but also in the network of forces and relationships of a spiritual as well as a material nature which a person establishes with other people during his life."

I'm not going to make another Livejournal joke, though I could. I saw this months ago and it only recently became interesting again.

2003-12-26T09:18:00.000-06:00

familiar strangers
"Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility."

it was my understanding that the technologies that enabled this kind of interaction were known as "coffee" and "alcohol," but I'm all for another battery I have to charge when I go home at night.

2003-12-25T20:56:00.000-06:00

for after you drink yourself to death

2003-12-25T20:14:00.000-06:00

human hair
"Most other mammals seem quite content with a luxuriant growth of fur. The idea of a chimpanzee pulling out the hair on its genital regions is ridiculous. Perhaps waxing is little more than a pseudo-sexual fad: another example of the kind of erotic titivation, such as body piercing and tattooing, that was once popular mainly among sailors, hippies and prostitutes. There is another possibility, though. It could be an extension of a longer-running animal story: humanity's evolution towards near nakedness."

My theory, for what it's worth, is that doing shit with your hair-shaving it, curling it, dying it-is a symbolic indication of effort, which is a sexy thing. I don't understand why evolutionary explanations always have to begin and end with biological responses to pressure. I wonder whether human generation of symbols isn't a biological response.

2003-12-25T13:25:00.000-06:00

Mmmm... tastes famous

Celebrity maulings are funny. Let's face it. The Roy Horn thing was pretty good, but you gotta admit the image of a hippo chasing a beauty queen around some godforsaken steppe in Botswana is just so much funnier.

2003-12-22T16:31:00.000-06:00

I like to look at appeal briefs for death penalty cases
They make me think hard.

The victim suffered a minimum of sixty incised slash and stab wounds, including severe wounds to the face, neck, back, torso, and arms. The victim also had blood stains on the knees of her pants, indicating that she had been kneeling in her blood.

2003-12-22T16:20:00.000-06:00

If I Made Art

I'm not an artist. My talents all lie in response, which a lot of people think is worthless. They're right, of course, but if I were an artist I would be like Deathboy and give a lot of my brilliant industrial music away for free. It's action like this that will make us recognize "Hey, when I copy music illegally I'm screwing the music industry. Fuck, I should copy more music. The music industry is probably the worst thing that ever happened to musicians (including Taliban rule in Afghanistan)."

Download. Go to live shows near your town. People who buy records are uninteresting people.

2003-12-19T09:25:00.000-06:00

"What's happening in my head now -- I'm having dreams, nightmares," said Powers. "I'm having the nightmares, it's bees in my throat because he choked me. Bees are stinging me. I don't see him and I don't see his face."

'A Natick man accused of beating his female roommate with a hammer last month has sent a Christmas card to her dog in which he claims to be the devil.'

2003-12-19T09:17:00.000-06:00

A vote for Clark is a vote for braaaaaiiins...

Sorry, Wes. You're my favorite zombie, but I just won't vote for a zombie. I just can't do it.

2003-12-18T23:51:00.000-06:00

One of those things you just have to keep reading once you start

... and suddenly I know what Tolkien had to say about elves and the sex they have.

Apparently they have it when they're married. Huh.

Wish I knew how I got to that site. Damn these cheap trucker stimulants.

2003-12-18T18:51:00.000-06:00

Your blogroll is stupid.
You know what's cool about Livejournal? It's definitely not the content. Second possibility is the way networks build up between blogs. If you ever take a minute to surf through sites based on friendlists and group memberships, you start to be able to paint little pictures of people based on the journals that link to them. Maybe they link back, maybe they share some affinity groups.

What's cool about this is that I know some people who've made friends based on interactions that were possible because of Livejournal group affiliations. "IM me. I'm in x(group) too." This is cool because Livejournal develops trust without using the traditional Internet methods of locking something up and giving cool people the key (crypto, digisigs).

The other thing you realize surfing Livejournal is that this has to be the most inefficient way to develop nominally social trust networks ever. It's also easy to lie about. I mean, nothing's locked up and nobody cool has the key.

But look! Research! Tools!

2003-12-18T11:14:00.000-06:00

Has SKYNET heard about this?

Anybody that knows me knows that I'm all about robots. Lots of gratuitous robots with lasers and tank treads. Particularly robots that fly. I'm confident that these men are liars and that their helicopter doesn't really do what they say it can, though. If you're going to build something that combines people's two greatest fears (thinking machines and flying metal), you announce it to the world in some more spectacular way than a stupid test flight over a New South Wales dog park.

I mean, if I developed something like this the first thing I'd do would be to build a small army of them and have them pour over some small midwestern town, showering it with ground up glass and cherry bombs. Obvious, right? Now that's a proof of concept!