Posts from — June 2006

Net Neutrality Song:
A new, downloadable song by Kay Hanley, Jill Sobule, and Michelle Lewis in favor of net neutrality. Nice, but the chorus sounds too much like it’s going to be “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man.”

And coming on the heels of this gloomy analysis of the congressional vote — heck, they even got Alcee Hastings to vote against it! — it does put one in mind of Tom Lehrer’s Folk Song Army (”they may have won all battles, but we had all the good songs”).
in favor of net neutrality

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i think it does sound a bit like mr. tamboruine man… but it is at least it is an interesting take on a musical protest against the powers-that -be changing the rules about the internet.

Not a Bad Idea:

You should die first, start out dead and get it out of the way.
Then you wake up in a nursing home, feeling better every day.
You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension.
When you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years
until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You drink alcohol, you party, you’re generally promiscuous and you get ready
for High School.
You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no
responsibilities, you become a baby.
Then, you spend your last 9 months floating
peacefully with luxuries like central heating, spa room service on tap, larger
quarter’s everyday.
And finally you finish off as an orgasm.

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I have to agree with Juha on this one… This is not a bad idea for a life. But i remember the episode of Voyagers where this was the case…. and it didn’t seem as happy.

PC Consumes 8.5 Watts, Has No Moving Parts:
someone has taken that boatload of cash and decided to put together the Solo Computer, a roughly-hewn prototype of a power-sipping PC with no moving parts that needs just 8.5 watts of solar power to run. That’s a fraction of the roughly 300 watts sucked up by garden-variety PCs here in the energy-wasting First World.
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This is closer to the technologies that the $100 computer needs, too bad it is $1200. However, as I’ve noted before technology is only one issue in computers for development and from my standpoint it is the smallest issue.

vanillasite.at :: about :
Vanilla is a simple, extensible hypertext system and framework for developing small-scale web applications written in REBOL. This humble website is the official home of Vanilla.
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a bliki?

The No Nonsense Guide To Women’s Rights :: AK Press:
How much has life really changed for women during the last decade? Has the women’s movement affected women all over the world? Has it changed women’s relationships with men? van der Gaag answers these questions with hard, sometimes disturbing, evidence. Many women have made huge leaps forward—in legal rights, political representation, employment, education, health—but beneath the surface the statistics are shocking. Vivid testimonies from women and men around the world explain why, especially in this post-feminist age, women’s rights are still very much an issue for men and women alike.

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more people should read this book.

Pro wrestler miffed by pregnancy tests – Yahoo! News:
A professional wrestler claimed Friday that the state is intruding on her privacy by requiring her to provide proof from her doctor that she is not pregnant within a week of every match.

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i think this is true, it is an intrusion of privacy, and more importantly. it is an intrusion upon her person and the right to her body. when will it become the case that women can’t perform physical labor without certified lack of pregnancy? because that is what this law basically is.

Joseph Turow is asking a bunch of questions about links and hyperlinks. No one has assembled the powers that be in regards to links before? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case, given the focus of hypertext conferences.

the social processes of hyperlinks? to what extent is the hyperlink a working principle in the social world. in my mind, the link is a jump or a break that moved.

Vertical search portals, Healthline .com as an expert on links. Inbound links that occur on our site that send things to us vs go away from us. Search engine marketing– the buying of links from google and yahoos and other companies. Which links and how they are presented to the user. Search engine optimizaiton, the attempt to get ‘free traffic’ As part of a contract, they provide a link to them. The feeling of reciprocity. LInks from individual bloggers…. interesting, he didn’t talk about web authors other than

An API, a rest that pauses that makes it seem as if there has been a link… Circulating people through high value areas of a site. A responsibility for who we link to. We have a white list of people that we link to. We should include them, expose them, and then as advertise supported, they include those specifically to make money.
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Underscore marketing… a journalist and a blogger. A turning point in the hyperlinks history… the advent of google. ‘google bought relevence back to search?’

link spam… yes it is a problem…

if page a links to page b, then within that context, page a is voting for page b. there is alot of social value in links. a citation, a vote of confidence, a handoff to send an idea to someone else. on the business side, they want the link in the value to be found.

I wonder if being remembered is more important than being found.

spamblogs and the value of hyper links. Spam bl

microsoft… what the interaction should be… so they are considering alternative models of interaction through hyperlinks. he works on trying to understanding the economic model. a very broad view of hyperlinking. Moved into vr and the web later. add-funded software? putting ads throughout software systems. stepping into the areas in ways that are commercial. to provide value to both consumer and advertiser and in the least doesn’t enfuriate the consumer.

microsoft is an ‘ecosystem’ company…..
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Rosen:Raymond Williams– “There are no masses, there only ways of seeing people as masses”

Rosen:The age of mass media has lasted about 300 years. The art and science has advanced tremendously during that time…..

reformulating the mass into what. baudrillard spoke about the death of the mass media in the 70’s. . the thing is that there are no masses.

rosen: the internet is efficient at cutting through layers of masses. It is changing the balance of power in the media world. it became more real when he started blogging himself.

i’d use the term transversality. to what extent is transversalitty

Rosen: I didn’t really understand what instapundit was until i spent about an hour. The surface that you see is only meaningful because of all of the surfaces behind it that you don’t see. He seems to see the merit of disintermediation of blogs. He bypasses the gatekeepers. For him, linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom and the decline of certain kinds of gatekeepers and his own abilities as an academic to reach all kinds of people who otherwise would not know his work. It took him a while to realize the importance of search in relation to his links.

We’ve known for years that links transform the relationship of readers to what is being read.
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the network neutrality question is the first question.

there is just no way that ‘this is what the masses want. we’ll find a way to work around it. ….

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Rosen: I’ve had the perception that this blogging world, this democratic world, won’t last, or can’t last. they won’t let us keep doing this, we are too free.

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Valuing the link is google’s greatest virtue. The ethic of the link is that we link to that which we disagree. We value the discussion, we value things that matter. in the link world, the link creates a value.

will we lose the faith in the system of links?

The act of consumption is now the act of creation… that is baudrillard’s consummativity…

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link begging does not work… we are in the end talking about traffic….

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three reasons people blog from mcsoft
1. for their personal network.
2. fame
3. fortune……

hmmm, i don’t actually blog for those reasons, well… if you can call this a blog… The reason that i blog is that i like to put my ’stamp’ on things that i think are worth noting in the world.

Rosen: The easiest way to get a link is to talk about my blog and its work.

In sort, a link is reputation creation.
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question: how do i know which one to value in relation to link, placed links and advertising links? how do i know what is relevant.

sometimes we need the human filter. irrellvant stuff is ‘killing the blogosphere’

what is the intent of the person behind a link….?
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The web architecture is links. -weinberger
we have a couple different uses of links. there is a dichotomy-ways for people to connect 1to1, then the commercial use of links…
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noise…. has value too
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digital id doesn’t mean that you have to identify yourself
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Josh Greenberg. – embed microformats that explains relationships

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rosen: it would be great to have an urgency measure. a triple underline….
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immediacy is very important for blog search….
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A real time summary.

the Cincy airport does not have free wi-fi…. In this day and age, all concourses should have wifi, there is no excuse not to make people’s lives in airports just that much easier. if you want to have two levels of access, one somewhat slow for email and web, and then one super fast for business or other high-end users to pay for, that i think is fine. However, there should be a base level of infrastructural networking in all airports for no cost. Otherwise cincinatti airport could be very nice, but alas without free networking it isn’t.

Yoda Backpack:
Stay on target! Star Wars nerds can add one more scene of the original trilogy to their re-enactment list. Inside this Yoda backpack you can place your lightsaber, your MacBook, and a cellphone to call mom to pick you up when you’re all done. If they’d only make a slave Leia full-sized plushie. – Jason Chen

Plush Yoda Backpack [Thinkgeek via OhGizmo]

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i’d like one of these….

Teaching and Developing Online.: June 2006 Archives:
Quote of the Day

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it.

Pierre Gallois
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yes, i think David Noble and Langdon Winner both made similar arguments. However, as any technologists know…. GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.