Category — General

A patent on footnotes. Ross Mayfield reports that the SBC's is claiming a patent on website navigation, via BoingBoingSBC is claiming that it holds… [BookBlog]

so this is another patent that needs to be busted, lets just think here, how about wordstart 5.1 that did this, would that break the patent?

Distributed Book Club. DJ Adams has created a distributed book club application that “finds if anyone has been talking about any of your… [BookBlog]

nifty, lots of neat books that could be talked about.

an orgasm in every pot?. “Documenting the orgasm”: An interview with Annie Sprinkle : “I have a vision for the future where all the necessary sex education will be available for everyone; there will be no more need for abortion, no more sexually transmitted diseases. No one will ever go hungry for sex because there will be sex kitchens all over town serving sex instead of soup.” [MetaFilter]

Annie Sprinkle, a very bright woman, i've read most of her books, but not all of her articles. this interview though looks to be interesting and perhaps even poignent if taken in regards to the new 'victorianism' of the american public

Will Game Boy Fall Victim To Nokia Man?. Plastic::Games::Trends: “The release of the GameBoy Advance only strengthened Nintendo's hold, but with the advent of cell phone gaming, Nintendo may be facing fierce competition. ” [Plastic: Most Recent]

it probably will fall, just a matter of time.

Undesign. Liz Bailey recently wrote an article called Lo-Fi Allstars (PDF) for Graphics International on the trend toward simpler, more usable web design. The article includes a few quotes from me about weblog design. Here's part of a rambling email interview I did for the article:

“Weblogs have definitely affected the look and feel of the overall Web. With weblogs, the design doesn't matter so much. It'… [kottke.org]

This is something that i preach, though not effectively.

Politics and Happiness?.

Two new interesting works with political themes have been released under Creative Commons licenses.

Gritty, A Critique of the Global Good Life, by Michael Wadleigh and Cleo Huggins, is an overview of global economics and politics presented in an easily digestible format. The work offers a thoughtful commentary on politics, the media, and other social issues. Gritty complements its critiques with a wide variety of statistics and graphics that tell a story beyond words.

Your Guide to Modern Living, by Raymond Pirouz, makes the case for a new type of economic system based on abundance rather than scarcity. It asserts that economic progress — more specifically automation — might free people to find richness in life through family, creativity, and spirituality.

Both works are licensed under Creative Commons attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works licenses, so pass them around to friends, put them on your site, and print them out — that's what this is all about.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

nifty, these both look good, now if we could get others to do the same.

Words You Won't Be Hearing. If “democracy” is government by the demos (people) and “aristocracy” is government by the aristos, then what would you call a government formed by the connections among people? That's the question I posed, more or less, to the blogiverse's resident Greek-Latin-Aramaic-French-German-Hebrew scholar, AKMA. He responds bravely to my question: There'd be a form of metechein, so “metechocracy.” Zeugnumi or synzeugnumi mean “join,” or “yoke”; what about “zeugnocracy”? Power to the Zeugnoids! AKMA has posted a sermon he gave on Thursday about The White Guy's Burden. (This doesn't do it justice; you'll have to read it for yourself.)… [Joho the Blog]

It would be Democracy, sorry. Links can't govern, people have to…. However, one translation of demos is Mob, as we get from the head of a mob like group can be called a demogogue. then there is autarchy, or self rule, which may be what you are really looking at in this case, i don't know.

Rethinking out loud.

I first visited the subject of terror when I read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, many years ago.

I'm revisiting her thinking now. It's complicated stuff, and somewhat dated; but it deals with verities I think we need to factor into our convesations about the War on Terrorism, whatever that is.

More later. Right now I need some sleep.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

I think that 'dated' always refers to a persons grasp of their own history and their historical situatedness. Yes, Arendt does use certain historically situated examples, but I agree with Doc when he says that her theory is as applicable today as it was then. Other related and interesting reads are from the Frankfurt School, with books like 'The Authoritarian Personaity' and 'One Dimensional Man', etc.

Houston, We Have a Problem.

I host my sites on with Pair, and I've been extremely happy with their service. I don't think I've had a single second of down time that was due to them (due to my computers… months, but never them). They also provide me with statistics, which I looked at last night for the first time in a while. I have a 400MB per month quota on my disk usage and I'm already at 430MB, and it looks like I'm over my 500MB quote for bandwidth, too.

Oops.

\

I have a theory, I think that one of the reasons for the high load is the large amount of blogs that use feeds directly from the site. If we use a feed aggregator, like newsisfree.com then that load should go down signifcantly, so instead of everyone hitting your site, they hit another site, and that site hits your site once an hour.

Kepler – A Digital Library for Individuals

“The purpose of Kepler is to give any user the ability to easily self-archive publications by means of an “archivelet”: a self-contained, self-installing software system that functions as an Open Archives Initiative data provider. Kepler archivelets are designed to be easy to install, use and maintain. Kepler is a perfect solution for those that need to be OAI-PMH compliant, but do not have the resources for more complicated OAI-PMH software installations. Some features of Kepler include:

• Configurable community standards
• Tailored publication and search services
• Broad and fast dissemination
• Interoperable with other communities

In this web site we document and make code available from an NSF supported project to develop Kepler for communities that wish to tailor their publication and search services and enforce configurable standards. Our long-term vision is to provide tools and software for communities to easily deploy digital libraries that are customized for their needs, can be populated, managed, and are “open” for development of future services.” [via Library News Daily]

[The Shifted Librarian]