Bruno throwing snowballs at me and TyOriginally uploaded by Shawna Nelles. Last night at Laïka, I had a brief conversation with Michael, founder of Ile Sans Fil and good friend, about various things, including how places are not just geographic...
Social Category Archive
Running man?
Part of the premise of the movie "Running Man" is how the main character gets framed as a murdering police officer by manipulating video evidence. Now, Photoshopping images and AfterEffects-ing video is already possible but it's still a huge pain...
disconnect
Every time I come to Japan, the biggest frustration is getting a mobile phone. This time it's not a phone I need (I have two I could use) as much as just a connection. It seems that will be just...
Everything part II
continuation of previous post They say there is opportunity in chaos. The chaos they speak of exists generally outside, and on the fringes of, "The System". Humanity, for better or worse, seeks always to order, structure, the chaos and...
Everything
(rambling alert!!!) Everything is a node. And every node can be, at once, part of many contexts, and can also, just by being, create many contexts. Every node has many properties. And contexts can add and modify properties of nodes....
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated....
Share
If the world were 100 people. (a flash movie based on an old internet meme) Share what you can....
Open Data Movement talk in Helsinki
For the last two weeks I have been dying for an excuse, any excuse, to be in Helsinki right now. The announcement of Matt Biddulph's Aula talk today comes a full 48 hours too late for me to do up...
Location Portals
Michael finally went and got himself a "this is not personal!" weblog where he will talk about something that is central to everything he hopes and dreams about (in a non personal way! hehe). If you're interested in location based,...
Certifiable
Quick! Someone make a t-shirt for these people. It should say: "Non-conformity is the new conformity" or "zealotry is sexy again!" ("I'm with stupid"'s already been done.) Pride is such a terribly dangerous thing. And too often people confuse pride...
10 years on
I just came across this interview with Joi done in 1995. Reading it I am struck by a few things: - 10 years ago Joi was roughly my age. - He saw very very clearly what was going on, on...
Marvin! Robots!
My friend Marvin, whom I met at the Global Voices conference in London last december, sent me an email the other day. Amongst other things he shared this: I wanted to tell you of my success in being accepted...
Medieval ballisticism
In a follow-up to my "It's not about you" post a few weeks back, Mike Migurski, lead dev on ReBlog, points me to this complaint on "The Taming of The Band-Aid", a small, local weblog about one person's agricultural efforts...
Gentle brush past my shoulder
This is so close to me it's not even funny. Nokia and Yahoo! add Flickr support in Nokia Nseries Multimedia Computers You can upload your full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or image Gallery application on your...
Summing it up
My post on "it's not about you" the other day sparked a good thread of debate which culminated in Hugh staking some key points, and Karl responding very clearly and directly, and in my opinion, right on the money, so...
It's not about you
At least not the way you may be led to believe it is. With apologies to Stewart and Caterina, the whole Flickr team and all the folks involved in this "Web 2.0" stuff, who, for the most part, are truly...
David Suzuki
I've been meaning to write about David Suzuki for a long time, and haven't yet mainly because I have not done what I told myself I'd do first: actually get acquainted with "his stuff", knowing it would affect my life...
Orwell's "Notes on nationalism"
Don't have the time to expound on this seminal text more profoundly at the moment but wanted to point it out. First a salient quote: Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world...
fragments
on lies: a necessary and healthy feature of sociality is lying. Lying is a feature, not a bug. The great dream of a utopian society is a system where lies are not necessary; the great nightmare, one where it...
Happy 2nd Birthday Flickr!
Mosaic: Happy Birthday Flickr!Originally uploaded by jbum. Wow, I totally missed it this year. Happy birthday gang!! Thanks SO much for this wondrous world of marvels. I moblogged Stewart, Ben and Eric introducing Flickr at ETech 2004, and I was...
歲歲平安 Suìsuì píngãn
(Everlasting peace year after year) 恭喜发财 Kung hei fat choy to my chinese friends celebrating the new year; may it not be a dog. :) Sadly ironic, my sister's puppy somehow managed to asphyxiate itself with a plastic bag yesterday...
Local Government Organizations (LGOs)
ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiative) - Local Governments for Sustainability We provide technical consulting, training, and information services to build capacity, share knowledge, and support local government in the implementation of sustainable development at the local level. Our...
Where's my head?
It's not that I am going senile or any such thing... it's just that... "my memory space is being flattened, in places, especially recently, by prolonged use of asynchronous text-based tele communication" In other words, I am beginning to suspect...
Backchannel
Justin's made his backchannel experiments an official project at the USC IMD, where he is studying. Having experienced several types of backchannel setups myself, though never of the intensely focused and tweaked 14 screens of the ZML, I can say...
freedom vs. liberty
Dictionary definitions of these two terms, just to make something clear: FREEDOM noun the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint : we do have some freedom of choice | he...
Accepting
"Have the courage to change what you cannot accept, the strength to accept what you cannot change, and the wisdom to know one from the other." I've long admired this proverb but it never quite sat well with me. I...
Two disturbing
Mark Federman recently posted two rather disturbing entries. And How is One Certified as Sane? Although this story is a year old, one of our students brought it to my attention last evening. According to the British Medical Journal (and...
Expression Under Repression
Rebecca and Ethan and a few other of the Global Voices Online team were WSIS in Tunisia this week and today gave a workshop presentation on "Expression Under Repression", despite technically having been canceled "by the authorities". Very exciting, awesome...
Human hands
In the process of clearing up a misunderstanding, Ethan points to a great article by one Justin Mason about cellphone repair stalls in the streets of India. Amongst other things, it speaks to how most people in a consumerist culture...
LibriVox
Friend Hugh started up a neat "sorta Project Gutenberg for audio books" called LibriVox. The project has gotten some good traction and attention - Hugh was invited to the recent Open Library launch shindig by Brewster Kahle - and he's...
Immersive Web
About a week ago I went for chinese food with Michael. We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks and Mike had just returned from what seemed like a very exciting trip to Europe. He recounted parts of his...
You say hello, I say goodbye...
Well, it's happened.The American-based internet giant, AOL, wholly-owned by Time-Warner, has formed a working partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to permit unlimited surveillance of the millions of AOL online members, according to a report from the U.S....
What we need is more McLuhan
I've been meaning to send some link love (daaah, cannot believe I used that phrase) to Mark Federman's new weblog. Mark's the Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Center at the University of Toronto. He used to write at their official...
Google swallows the internet whole, and you with it
First, it was about "indexing" all of the web. Then, it bought a small chunk of that web (Blogger). Then Google said "hey, there's more than the web out there!" and Google Mail was pushed out. Quickly followed by Google...
Trust
"Lead Camino developer Mike Pinkerton has announced that he has accepted a position at Google." Public (and there are more such announcements coming) Micah Dubinko -> YahooXForms Specification Editor TV Raman IBM -> GoogleParticipant of many W3C working groups...
On *isms
Cynicism is, IMHO, the worst *ism there is, for it is the only *ism that cannot be cured with more education. That said, here is a nice set of guidelines for civil discourse....
Safe travels gaucho
So, Steven's probably sitting on the tarmac at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport right now, beginning a 2 month trip to Cuba and, I suspect, to the core of himself. No, he's not going to go sit on the beach. He's...
KhmerOS
Awesome We envision a country where Cambodians can learn and use computers in their own language, a country that does not have to change to a new language in order to use computers! Bravo. They're translating and localizing stuff like...
Your rights to photograph
Your Rights and Remedies When Stopped or Confronted for Photography The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission...
Flickr & Creative Commons
Help push the more widespread awareness of the use of Creative Commons licenses on Flickr. You can copy and paste the code below into your Flickr Profile's "Describe Yoruself" field: ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please consider changing your Flickr photo license option...
Microsoft says
Teach your kids the basics of safer blogging before they start Dated July 7th, MS published this article in their "Security At Home > Child Safety" webzine. Interestingly, much of it applies to everyone, not just kids: - Ask yourself...
Pointing thataway
I just want to point out that Joi's recent entry on the whole Live 8 thing has the best comment stream I've seen over there in a long time. (Sorry Joi... it's not you, it's the nutjobs and relentless pessimists...
Del.icio.us hash
A month ago, joshua mentioned an easy breezy little addition one can do to one's site to allow users to easily del.icio.us bookmark entries on one's weblog. In some cases though, you might like an easy way to see how...
Playing Flickr Peepshow
Playing Flickr For one week in May, the diners in Restaurant 11 will be confronted with the photos the users of Playing FLICKR select. By sending a keyword through SMS, users can request all photos on the flickr.com database that...
Google aquires Dodgeball
"On May 11th dodgeball.com was acquired by Google!" The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what...
"Meet the world" flags
We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the...
The keitais are coming!
Slowly over the past year I've noticed a subtle transition in the mobile phone handsets that have been available here in my home market. But today it really struck me as apparent: the keitais are coming. Not in features or...
Google Maps application contextualizes real estate
This is stunning. By combining Google Maps and craigslist housing listings you get a very quick visual contextualization of the economic distribution of population for a city; which the affluent neighborhoods, which are less so. Not that that is necessarily...
what daaa?
Jean Snow reports on something funny, yet inevitable, happening in one of his english classrooms: What's a Cassette? there was one kid (about 7 or 8 years old) who took the cassette box and put it up to his ear....
Sound familiar?
"Attention Deficit Trait" caused by the technologies of constant interruption: Clive Thompson via Techdirt has a fascinating post on Attention Deficit Trait, a related sydrome to Attention Deficit Disorder, according to Dr. Edward Hallowell. "It has basically the symptoms as...
Let's expand on folksonomies
First of all, purely for background and some interesting ideas, the Wikipedia definition of "taxonomy". Taxonomy (from Greek ταξινομία (taxinomia) from the words taxis = order and nomos = law) may refer to either a hierarchical classification of things, or...
Tagsurf
Just came across Tagsurf. Haven't wrapped my head around it yet but having registered and logged in (the registration process is made difficult by a barely legible capcha), it looks to be very powerful. I guess one way to describe...
Now what?
So AOL has updated it's Terms Of Use for AIM: Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title...
The King of Yet-Also
Momus gives us this fantastic essay about Michael Jackson: Nota: This is not about your or my or anyone's morals. One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment...
Forbes copy writer has odd sense of humor
From the Forbes 400 Richest in America 2004 writeup of Pierre Omidyar: Former computer programmer launched online auctioneer Ebay in 1995. Today the world's biggest dot-com ($62 billion market capitalization), which lets consumers bid on everything from arcane Americana to...
Non-Disclosure Agreement
After not even hearing the words for well over 3 years, today I was faced with no less than two prospective NDA's to sign. I haven't yet. Reading over the one I did get sent to me, I am struck...
Area bagel
or "What do Amazon, A9 Search, Yellow Pages, 90210, and the Mile End of Montreal have in common?" Trying to see if I had a connection, I hit my A9 bookmark. It worked. Once there I noticed a prominent link...
Communication in Evolution: Social and Technological Transformation
An Interview with Derrick de Kerckhove Director, McLuhan Program   conducted by Álvaro Bermejo AB: In spite of its totalising ambitions, can the Net develop a new Humanism, a new Enlightenment? DdeK: Maybe, but Humanism and Enlightenment may not be...
Tags, ontologies, community and feedback
"Com' follow me now!" Thinking hard about tags - the new black as Ado says - and various conversations I've had recently, mostly with Karl, about ontologies, explicit relationships (hah!), etc. Say I have a bunch of files that I...
Boids
Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo? The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan (Architecture Landscape Urbanism) 2001 - Akira Suzuki Picked this little gem up at the CCA bookstore the day I attended the Devices...
Open Source Religion
"Release early, release often." (disclaimer: many of the facts - names of cultures, places, people and dates - are not terribly known to me. I am not a scholar, I'm a hobbyist.) There exists a fantastic Open Source project...
Malaise
New environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver The biologist Otto Lowenstein, is his book on The Senses (Penguin Books,Ltd.), has some most helpful observations on the problems that arise upon any change in sensory mode, such as a...
In a postpostmodern state of mind.
In order to avoid ambiguity, over- or false- interpretation, it is crucial that one properly contextualize every element, in relation to every other element in it's environment. Meaning can only be found in the relationship of each object with each...
Identites and celebrity
"Madame Hollywood" Felix Da Housecat Everybody wants to be hollywood The fame, the vanity, the glitz, the stories One day I'll become a great big star You know like the big dipper And maybe one day you can visit my...
How am I not myself?
- Do I bring my own chains? - We always do... I ‚ô• Huckabees‚òÖ‚òÖ‚òÖ‚òÖ‚òÖ...
Tail wagging
As Joi links to me from his entry on Chris Johnson's Wired article "The Long tail", I figure I should riff a bit on what I see in all this and why I reminded him of Momus' excellent "Pop Stars, nein danke!" article.
Lost in connections
Just noticed that in his track "God Only Knows" off of Fantasma, Cornelius samples The Jesus & Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey", which is the closing track of Lost In Translation as the credits begin to roll.
A9 leveraging Amazon
You don't need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.We don't advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them.... To see how this works, do some A9 searches from your computer at work and then sign in to A9.com from your computer at home.How can we afford this additional π/2% discount?Sponsored links revenue -from the small text-based ads on A9.com and Amazon.com search results pages -will help offset costs we incur through the Rewards promotion.
Creative Commons Activists and Activism
all VERY well done!), I can't seem to find a resources center and a community support network for people to get really involved beyond choosing a license and applying it to their work - provided they get it and they actually produce stuff. There are loads of people who don't read weblogs, or WIRED magazine, who not only don't know that they as creatives have options, but also don't fully realize the cultural lock-down they are living in. Ignorance of rights and responsibilities is the death knell for freedom, choice, democracy...
"Surroundings Defend System"
The weapon against boring and weary surroundings With seamless vision diminishers, adjustable safetybelt, 40 Watt stereo speaker installation and standard compliant 3.5 mmm jack-plug for fully compatible audio-experience, you can totally shut yourself off from the surrounding world and...
Timestamp timezones in Flickr
(and by extension, in social software enabled content management systems, especially moblogging ones) Currently, Flickr timestamps everything in it's developers' timezone, Pacific Standard Time. To anyone not on the western seaboard of North America, this is pretty much useless. Who...
An example
Here is an example of information hunting and establishing connections between bits of data online. This story will remain intentionally vague and short on specific URLs for two reasons: to protect the individual's privacy and to keep my Google rank...
Mobile
I finally went out and got a cameraphone. Well, it's actually way more than that but anyways. So I have begun "moblogging" like a fiend. You may have noticed. I am sending pics to both my own MT-based MobiLog AND...
Death in the age of Social Software
Following the dreadful email mentioned in the previous post, I was contacted with the following suggestion: ... should we put something onto the bulletin board at Friendster for the non-bloggers who know her there? It seems like a grim task,...
An economy of caring
Friend Jim Moore is doing all he can to garner attention, raise awareness and just get people to care about a situation of genocide and other nastyness happening in Sudan at the moment. Much of his efforts are focused on...
Who, what, when, where and why, and the death of the author
After reading Foucault's short piece "Author Function", I thought the following. Take any expression, be it a text, a song, a painting, and label it "The What". Label the author (composer, painter, etc) "The Who", and and attach it as...
I and U
Jyri posits: What counts as a person? What might it mean to design not for preexisting, independent individuals with fixed boundaries but for partially known, locally enacted performances, out of which "individuals" may temporarily materialize as relational effects? How might...
When thoughts collide
I received today my copy of Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building" and floated down through the two first chapters as though carried by a gently nimble stream of clear water. More peaceful pondering on that later. I ordered...
Equal schmequel
Equal footing of social standing on a level playing field is a pipe dream; one that if you smoke too much from will blind you to the malcreants who will take advantage of your torpor to hoist themselves above you....
What do you call it when
This morning, out of the blue, old buddy Michel IMs me this: i had a friend who had a cool idea for something that'd be kinda like friendster, but for books, music and dvds and stuff. so basically a group...
Friendster about to up the ante... a tad
Decided to drop in on Friendster for the first time in weeks. Was greeted by this... In the next few weeks, we will be introducing changes to the system to improve site performance. If all goes according to plan, Friendster...
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