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Tuesday, February 11, 2003 |
Taking Our Lives Online.
People with Personal Websites
"According to a December 2002 survey of 501 adults in the US, conducted by the University of Maryland and Rockbridge Associates, 21% of US consumers have their own personal website, or have a family member with his/her own site. Additionally, 13% say they own or a family member owns a domain name or web address for a hobby or personal interest....
The study determined that 77% of US adults connect to the internet through a regular phone line while 20% are making high-speed connections. Of the broadband subscribers, 12% use a cable modem and 8% are using digital subscriber line (DSL). This is also the recently-publicized study which revealed that US employees with net access at both home and work spend an average of 5.9 hours per week at home online for work purposes and an average of 3.7 hours per week online at work for personal interests." [eMarketer Daily]
That's a pretty small sample, but if the statistics hold up when scaled, it would show that people are truly creating their own content, rather than just sitting back and letting the internet become a one-way (corporate) medium. And 77% of them are publishing via a dial-up connection, so they don't need broadband to do it. I have to think that blogs will only increase those numbers, as will photoblogging for families.
Of course, they may also be getting domain names in order to maintain a stable email address. Will Cox pointed me to a notice that Comcast will maintain AT&T Broadband email accounts through 2004 because so many customers complained about having to change their address yet again. I'm glad they're listening, a nice change in this industry. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:10:42 PM 
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Cheery Tune.
Have you seen the Cheer commercial in which a boyfriend and girlfriend are talking on the phone about a black shirt she gave him? He says it's faded from all of the times he's worn it, so she tells him to wear it the next time they meet. He grabs the sweater and washes it repeatedly to make it fade, but because he's using Cheer, it doesn't.
Have you also noticed that they've added some fine print at the bottom of the screen that you can go to http://www.cheer.com/song to hear the full version of the tune that plays during the commercial? If you follow that link, you're re-directed to the main page, the song automatically starts playing, and there's a link to download the full version (for Windows or Mac). Did people contact them asking about the song, or did the company proactively push the envelope of advertising for laundry detergent?
It's not a particularly great song, but it's interesting that they're making it so prominent on their television commercial and web site. I can't remember where I saw it last week (I hate when that happens), but there was an article noting that there haven't been any good advertising jingles lately, in part because companies are licensing real songs by real artists and attaching their brands to them. The Cheer song (which I assume is an original since there are no credits available for it) is an interesting combination of this phenomenon, and a good use of their web site. It made me visit. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:10:19 PM
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Ergonomics of Reading. I do not pay nearly enough attention to proper ergonomics when reading, maybe because if I get too comfortable I go to sleep. With as much reading as we need to do in knowledge worker roles, it only makes sense to understand the physical factors involved and how to use them to get the most from our reading experience. The article from Ergoboy covers lighting, bookstands, and chairs with links to their products in each area.
Ergonomics of reading. Ergonomics of reading is not the same as haptics of comprehension...read about factors involved before opening the book. [future of the book news] [b.cognosco]
9:08:02 PM
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Quote of the Day.
Sorry, it's already third hand, so I have no idea who to attribute this to, except the vague notion that it was heard on TV, maybe from a Detroit area station.
"Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion." [The .NET Guy]
9:06:56 PM
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The original name for the WWW, was.
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized, by Tim Berners-Lee
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized, by Tim Berners-Lee
This document was an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990. [via Karl] [A Frog in the Valley.]
[Audioblog/Mobileblogging News]
 While Tim was dreaming up and programming the WWW, we were helping to build a world enabled by multimedia. 1989 was the year we started licensing our system software, selling big numbers and getting recognition everywhere. Miles and I were flying to Japan allot, I was giving speeches and in general - the multimedia industry was being born. At least that's what we thought was going on.
In retrospect - we were simply raising the bar on functionality and enabling all sorts of OTHER new kinds of functionality, commerce and communication. Lots of people made lots of money - yet most people feel that the CD ROM era was a bust. But one could argue that without multimedia, there never would have been the WWW.
Interesting side note - I'm Chapter 17 and Tim is Chapter 18 in a book entitled: Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality. Joi's brother-in-law Scott Fisher - is Chapter 22 [Marc's Voice]
9:05:58 PM
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Andrew Seybold says hot spot business bankrupt idea: Seybold points out that venues need a crush of users just to break even, but everyone is running headlong into the business of installing hot spots. I'd argue that the difference between now and a couple of years ago is that the headlong rush is for wireless ISPs to encourage venues to install hot spot hardware and share revenue with the wISP as a billing/aggregator/infrastructure supporter. (Shades of The Onion's headling that Americans agree that mass transit should be used by other Americans.) In the olden days of 2000-2001, Wayport, MobileStar, and many others poured millions into building out infrastructure and even paying fees to have access to venues. The current model is partnership in which the venue bears the capital cost typically in exchange for a relatively high short-term return. [80211b News]
8:58:12 PM
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Support a Library
"Scott who runs lights.com has a page outlining which libraries have affiliate programs so that you can donate to your library when you buy books online. Also noted is a list of which bookstores have affiliate programs to begin with, it's not all Amazon.com." [librarian.net]
This will be an excellent resource for libraries interested in this type of program because Peter will be expanding this resource into a full how-to:
"Check out our guide for libraries on how to make money on the Internet with affiliate programs. We've just posted our first set of reviews, news and recommendations.
Book mark the site because we'll be adding content on:
- how to set up your own store,
- how you can integrate links to bookstores via MARC tags in OPAC records,
- links to comparison shopping engines,
- and cover other affiliate programs."
Peter also notes that the University of Calgary has an online eBookstore. It will be interesting to see how this fares!
"eBooks are a portable, versatile, and interactive new technology with the potential to dramatically improve learning. We carry a growing number of eBook titles in the Microsoft Reader, Palm Reader, and Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader formats."
[The Shifted Librarian]
I like the which libraries have affiliate programs since I've often Amazoned books I first started reading at the library. I wouldn't have a problem giving them a little kick back for allowing me to puruse the book for free.
8:54:10 PM
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If You Prefer to Get Your RSS in Your Email Inbox.....
The Shaman RSS Automailer
"Once you sign up, you'll be able to choose from the hundreds of news feeds currently available, and have the latest additions sent to your inbox. These news feeds are from quality news and information sites like CNN, Slashdot, and Webmonkey.
Now you'll be the first one to know about that new article on Slashdot, or that movie review, or that stock tip. You'll get the latest updates from your chosen sites, every hour*. Staying current has never been so easy." [via The FuzzyBlog!] [The Shifted Librarian]
8:49:43 PM
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Mimicry Nation. My three year old daughter is great at learning by mimicking. She will do things sort of like grownups do it. She'll go through the motions, press the buttons, say the words, and often she'll quickly learn to do things for real. She's recently been practicing jokes, and she's mimicked the rhythm really well, even if the punch line isn't strictly speaking funny. Oh, it is very funny when she does it, no matter what the punch line is. It is a great strategy for a baby or a toddler. Just start faking it till you make it. It is delightful and wonderful and entertaining that it works.But what starts worrying me is that it also seems to be a pervasive principle in education in schools as well. American schools is what I'm talking about. Their homework and essays often adds up to sounding like you're actually talking about something real and useful, even if you aren't. So, if you can just regurgitate some of the materials you've studied, and put together sentences that look fairly correct, you'll do pretty well. And if the components are mostly right, you'll get a good grade. Nobody pays much attention to whether the things you do actually are useful.I realized some horrible things about education some years ago when it was part of my job to hire computer programmers. I hired a dozen or so programmers over several years. To do that, I had to look through the stacks of thousands of applications we'd gotten, and I needed to interview hundreds of people and pick the ones to hire. And a disturbing picture quickly started forming. Very often, the more advanced a degree the person had in Computer Science, the more hopeless it was to expect them to program anything real. Well, generalizing is dangerous, so let me point out that I'm talking about those who didn't have real jobs as programmers while they were studying, and who didn't spend all their sparetime programming video games. And, don't get me wrong, there are some really useful things on the curriculum in Computer Science, which all programmers really ought to know. What I'm talking about is the people who just went through the college courses and exercises and exams, hoping to be great computer scientists, hoping they'd have a career once they were done. If it were just a Bacherlor's degree, there might be some hope that they could actually program, and that they might apply some of what they learned. If it was a Master's degree, it was probably too late. And the clerk in the store where we bought our computers, he had a Ph.D. in Computer Science, the poor fellow.The point is that here we have some people who've worked hard for years, and they've learned to get things *mostly* right, who've learned that if they get 80% of the questions right, they're doing well. If they can regurgitate what the textbook says, and make their answers look about right, they do well in school. They've been thoroughly trained and validated into doing things that look sort of right, but which aren't.The problem is that in the real world, if you have the job of building something that actually works, as a computer programmer or as an engineer, or you need to do something very precise and important, like surgery, you can't get away with anything much less than 100% right. You might get away with 99.99% right, and the last 0.01% will still haunt you. But if you're several percent off, the bridge will fall down, the patient will die, and your software just won't run. You can't *almost* save an account record and still call it an accounting program. It doesn't matter if you made a good effort and that your notes look good if you amputated the wrong leg.I solved my hiring problem by giving people actual tests that involved solving a problem by writing a program, and I hired the people who wrote a working program. The best programmer I hired was a 19 year old guy fresh out of highschool.The bigger point I'm trying to make is that a large percentage of the human population, even as grownups, are just mimicking what others are doing, regurgitating what they've heard, and trying to look right. And a surprisingly small percentage of people are actually thinking through and figuring out how to make things work. And the horrifying thing is that sometimes whole countries are run by people who're just actors who're kind of winging it and trying to say things that sound about right. And they gather people around them who're good at making things sound like they know what they're talking about. And when they say these things in the media, lots of people will repeat them, and will go around talking about stuff they really have no clue about, but they know how to act as if they do. [Ming the Mechanic]
8:48:48 PM
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Distribution of Choice.
Readers and conversors of this weblog will find Clay Shirky's article Power-laws Weblogs and Inequality on topic and target. It provides a good explanation of Power-laws and the preferential attatchment that drives them in blogspace. But as posted last week in Repeal the Power-law --
- not all links are created equal, and
- conversational relationships are not scale-free.
If you weave these principles into the current Power-law thread it reveals a model for the Distribution of Choice.
Clay offers some qualitative insight into inequality:
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Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair.
The first, of course, is the freedom in the weblog world in general. It costs nothing to launch a weblog, and there is no vetting process, so the threshold for having a weblog is only infinitesimally larger than the threshold for getting online in the first place.
The second is that blogging is a daily activity. As beloved as Josh Marshall (TalkingPointsMemo.com) or Mark Pilgrim (DiveIntoMark.org) are, they would disappear if they stopped writing, or even cut back significantly. Blogs are not a good place to rest on your laurels.
Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake.
Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary....
...In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.) |
Clay offers three segments of blogs which can be mapped to Malcom Gladwell's numbers of 12 and 150 (I gave away my copy of the Tipping Point this weekend, so Im paraphrasing, but also see Robert Patterson's outline of the Tipping Point):
(1) Blogs-as-mainstream-media: The Infinance of Syndication, a point to multi-point distribution of weak ties that realizes economies of scale.
(2) Blogging Classic: The Magic Number 150, a multi-point to multi-point distribution of weak ties.
"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar." —Robin Dunbar
(3) Blogs-as-dinner-conversation: The Strength of 12, a point-to-point distribution of strong ties. When most people are asked to list whom they would be deeply affected if they die, a measure of strong relationships, the average list is of 12 people.
Dave Winer reacts and says Clay should blog. Kevin Werbach interprets and rightly mediates the differences:
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Clay uses data on the distribution of blog links to predict the future evolution of the medium:
The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing.
I find that a pretty persuasive assessment.
Dave Winer thinks Clay is full of it, largely because he doesn't run a blog himself. None of Dave's criticisms, though, contradict Clay's piece. Clay, and the social network analysts, are considering blogs from above. To them, each site a data point. Those data points feed into graphs and link diagrams, producing insights. They are showing us the forest. Dave, on the other hand, is down among the trees. He's pointing out how quickly some pine trees grow, and the differences between maple and birch. He's the observer-as-participant, compared to Clay's observer-at-a-distance. The forest and the trees are both real, just not at the same time. |
Jason Kottke graphs the Power-law distribution of Technorati's Top 100 (Dave Sifry just created a new index of Interesting Newcomers which may differ in distribution, which I hope Jason graphs next). Jason also highlights the key constraint that governs attachment -- time:
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But what are weblogs competing for? Matt Webb posits that power laws arise due to scarcity. Links themselves can't be scarce (a page can have as many links as it can hold without running out), but they are a measure of something that is: people...More specifically, the time that people have for visiting sites and linking to sites is limited. |
Relationships take time. A strong relationship requires a continuous investment in time to stay current. Trust is built from this investment. A weak relationship requires no continuity, an affinity where time costs are optional.
A time investment is requirement for defining a relationship. And according to Duncan Watts, as you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish. Which changes the distribution of the network. The Distribution of Choice maps to three distinct networks, each optimized for a different time investment to realize relationships and each with a different distribution:
(1) Political Network
In a representative democracy, people are elected to carry the burden of political activities and decisions. Our vote is our proxy of affinity. A vote is not a strong tie and there is no personal relationship between the candidate and citizen. The elected optimizes their activities to serve and appeal to a constituency. Lots of babies get kissed, but few remembered aside from a generalized picture of how their future should be decided.
So too in mass media. A subscription is a vote and the media outlet serves an audience similar to a constituency. Weak ties between the media hub and subscribing node allow the hub to scale. So does the set of activities the hub engages in, by limiting the time committment to each subscriber through a more generalized service. Hubs respond to changes in their subscription base, constantly polling trackbacked referrer log opinion, reframing their content to appeal to the ever-growing base.
The Political Network is based upon representative weak ties instantiated by a link. A hub designs itself as an institution, optimizing the transaction costs of information flow for point-to-multipoint distribution and feedback. This allows it to scale -- creating a Scale-Free Network, or Power-law distribution.
But within the Political Network each hub also has its own Social Network. This Social Network of stronger ties has a lower transaction cost of passing information, and consequently, sways the activities and decisions of the hub with greater influence than the readership.
So why does this matter aside from graphing the egospace of blogging?
The Network is the Market. These distrubutions apply to commerce as network structure determines marketecture and have profound commercial implications. Tim Oren, a VC, points out how viable investments are "Diversity Businesses" that have a Political Network distribution:
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...Now being bloody-minded by current vocation, I'd like to ask what kind of businesses result at various points on the curve. Particularly, can you get a venture style exit from them, that is, 'do they scale?'. It shouldn't take too much business insight to realize that the vast majority of positions on the curve, if viable at all, are the cyber equivalent of mom-and-pop shops. Cash flow positive, providing a decent living to the operators and some enjoyment to the customers. Their territory is defined by specialized interest rather than by geography. No exit for folks like me. At the top of the curve, you can get an exit, if you were one of the first comers and marketed like hell. This is where the type of accretion discussed in the research comes in. So maybe there was something to the 'first mover advantage' after all, but too few chairs when the music stopped. Game over... |
(2) Social Network
The Social Network is based upon functional weak ties instantiated by an investment in time such as conversational inter-linked posts. An Social Nework is transactional by nature, with the means of establishing a relationship commoditized. Close to the Law of 150 in scale, a time investment is made each node to be at least peripherally concious of the other nodes and the information flow between them.
One design challenge for social software is extending the capabilities of people to hold a higher number of meaningful conversations and cultivate relationships. This is what Clay calls Blogging Classic, on steriods. The capability to extend the time and space of relationships.
Similar to the network distribution of Photography e-commerce sites category in the NEC Paper, it deviates from the Power-law.
(3) Creative Network
The Creative Network is based upon functional strong ties with an active and continious time investment. Instantiated by real world relationships with a firm foundation of trust with dense inter-linking. This is the core of a person's network, serves as the basis for regular collaboration and production, leveraging the Strength of 12. This Creative Network is an internal network, that feeds off of the external network (Social Network) for new ideas but is optimized to produce.
The requirements for a relationship of dense of interconnections are so high that what remains is a bell curve in distribution.
Next Steps
Taken together, the Political, Social and Creative Networks form an ecosystem in which people engage in the distribution of chosing relationships. This is just a qualitative observation that needs to be tested with the Blogmap project, but hopefully it provides a useful framework. But more than that, its a picture of blogspace that should help us value the different roles weblogs as communication tools play in our lives. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
8:45:13 PM
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A Bioweapon Worse Than Anthrax?. Tularemia, a seldom-mentioned but extremely infectious pathogen, could pose as great a bioterror risk as anthrax and smallpox, some experts say. Others, including the Centers for Disease Control, aren't so sure. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News]
8:44:19 PM
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Net Merchants Not Sold on Taxes. Under pressure from state lawmakers, more large chain retailers are adding sales tax to Web purchases. But pure online merchants are reluctant to jump on the tax wagon. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
8:44:03 PM
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EBay Coupon Sellers Clip for Cash. Enterprising eBay auctioneers are reselling the coupons that arrive as junk mail and litter the counter at the post office. Despite potential legal problems, it's become a booming cottage industry. By Christopher Null. [Wired News]
8:43:54 PM
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Nothing Like Starting the Morning with some Cheery News or.
Nothing Like Starting the Morning with some Cheery News or "Time to Buy The Duct Tape"
I completely tuned out mass media yesterday so it was quite surprising to wake up and find this in the New York Times:
The Bush administration issued detailed advice today on how the public should prepare for a possible terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, insisting that it was motivated by a sense of caution, not any specific intelligence that such an attack was imminent.
The mostly common-sense guidelines urged families to prepare a "disaster supply kit" that included a three-day supply of water, one gallon per person per day; food; a battery-powered radio; a change of clothes; an extra set of car keys; and cash.
Other advice was not so obvious, including the recommendation that people keep a supply of duct tape and plastic sheeting in their homes to seal off windows in the event of a chemical or biological attack.
"There is no specific, credible intelligence that says an attack using chemical or biological weapons is imminent," said Gordon Johndroe, the chief spokesman for Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security.
"However, this is prudent planning," Mr. Johndroe said. "We know of Al Qaeda's interest in obtaining these weapons, and we want people to be prepared so they can help themselves and their families should there be an incident." [_Go_]
When this, all of a sudden, filters into your everyday life in this way, it immediately becomes much, much more real. Chilling. At least it was for me.
And according to the Wall Street Journal only 700 of the required 500,000 emergency health care workers have gotten their smallpox vaccines (no link; actually read it in paper; go figure).
Here are the FEMA guidelines for "Citizen Preparedness". And since a lot of us blog geeks seem to have (much beloved) pets, here's a link to the guide for your pets. And lets not even get me started on the absolute stupidity of publishing this kind of actually important government information in a form, PDF, that has so many damn issues. [_Go_] [The FuzzyBlog!]
8:43:12 PM
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Bayesian and Latent Semantic analyses demystified. Very good, cogent explanation of Bayesian and Latent Semantic analysis techniques, which are means whereby a computer is asked to "understand" a document so that it can be automatically classified. Both techniques are being widely hailed as the great code hope of spam-filtering.
Latent semantic analysis (or indexing) is an application of what's called principal components analysis (PCA), or factors analysis, to the domain of information organization. In the basic version, you form a big 2-D matrix with documents (e-mails for instance) along one axis and terms (word, phrases) along the other, and fill in the entries with a 0 when the term doesn't occur in the document, and with a 1 (or count) when it does. Then you take the resulting monstrous matrix and grind it up with an algorithm that finds covariance patterns. That's to say, the associations of words "latent' in the document base you feed in are going to be found. Shovel in several weeks worth of news stories and it's going to be obvious that 'Saddam' and 'Iraq' are highly correlated, or 'Tiger' and 'golf'. The method actually kicks out a transformation matrix into which you can feed the terms observed in a particular document, and get out a score for that document in terms of "warness" or "golfness" - those are principal components, or factors. You compute and save as many factors as you want - presumably less than the number of original terms. (Apologies to any wandering mathematicians for the gross simplications.) Link Discuss (via JOHO the Blog) [Boing Boing Blog]
8:41:09 PM
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Internet gets its own telephone country-code. The International Telecommunications Union has allocated an entire country-code to Internet VoIP services, creating a virtual, global Internet "country." Pulver.com has already announced a service that uses the Internet country-code for VoIP numbers, so that calls from and to Internetland are not considered long-distance.
* A FWD member who is a father living in Berlin calls his son, a FWD member, in Hong Kong. Both the father and the son use their home SIP phones and "the call" is routed soley over the Internet. Both father and son can talk for as long as they like! Free! Any time, any day!
* Save on purchasing more phone lines for your sons and/or daughters. Setup FWD in their rooms, dorm rooms, your basement (if they talk too loud) and inform their friends' parents about FWD too. Everyone will be happy. The parents for the incredible savings and your kids because now they can talk all day long without hearing you complain to them. Everyone who lives in a broadband home should consider signing up for FWD! Link Internet gets its own telephone country-code (via Interesting People) [Boing Boing Blog]
8:38:42 PM
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MusicBrainz kicks azz, needs Macs. Robert Kaye has re-launched his MusicBrainz service today. MusicBrainz is set of Free Software tools that are used to fingerprint audio tracks in MP3, WAV, Ogg and other formats, and to create unique identifiers for songs.
What this means is that the MusicBrainz tools can sample a piece of an audiofile, create an "acousitic fingerprint" of the song, and then check with the MusicBrainz server to see if it knows about the song yet. If it does, your music-player will automagically fetch the artist, album, track title and other info (as well as reviews, ratings by people you trust, playlists that include the song...). If it doesn't, you can enter the track info yourself and submit it to the MusicBrainz database so that the next person who comes along will get the info.
This is a lot like GraceNote's proprietary CDDB service -- which is how iTunes and other players figure out which CD you have in the drive -- but it's way, way better. Organizationally, MusicBrainz is setting itself up as a nonprofit, so there'll be none of CDDB's expensive and restrictive licensing terms for people who want to make players that use the service.
But it's also technologically far superior. CDDB can only recognize CDs. But as music is increasingly distributed online without any CD package, CDDB is getting less and less useful (plus, CDDB is riddled with errors and has a really bad API, so it's hard to build sophisticated services that rely on it). MusicBrainz works off of acoustic fingerprints, which are granular to the level of a single track, recognizably at different sample rates, and work across different file-formats.
It gets better. Because each fingerprint is unique, it means that two people can unambiguously discuss the same track. I can send you a playlist from my computer and your computer can play the songs I'm suggesting, even if you've given them different filename, have them stored in different formats, or have added different metadata about them.
This is also an extremely sweet basis for building collaborative filters atop of. If your computer and my computer can say with confidence that two tracks are the same, we have the basis for collaboratively filtering our collections and finding stuff that we should be listening to -- even if we don't know it yet.
There's only one catch: none of this stuff runs under OS X -- yet. Which is a goddamned shame, but Robert's broke, and he needs Apple hardware to play with in order to get this stuff ported over to MacOS. This is seriously cool stuff, and all the kids're gonna want it. Let's hope someone out there knows someone at Apple who can intervene on Robert's behalf and get him a loaner so that the Rest of Us aren't left out in the cold.
The answer to this lies in the MusicBrainz community -- the community is comprised of individual contributors who work hard to enter and correct the data in the system. The MusicBrainz server software also enforces a peer review system, under which users must review and approve changes made by other users. The peer review system combined with the motivation, expertise and pride of its contributors will ensure that the data in MusicBrainz will be comprehensive and reasonably correct.
Only reasonably correct? No one can guarantee that all the data in a database is correct. Not even the commercial companies that provide metadata services can give this assurance. The MusicBrainz community will respond to problems found in the database and fix mistakes faster than any commercial company with paid contributors can, since the MusicBrainz community is global and is never closed for business. Furthermore, the community is more supportive of MusicBrainz than of other commercial services due to its open nature. Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!) [Boing Boing Blog]
8:31:51 PM
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IBM Grid Computing: Join with us to fight Smallpox. Through the smallpox Grid project, potentially more than two million personal computers will be linked to create a virtual supercomputer that could deliver processing power greater than the most powerful supercomputers in use today. Researchers will use this massive computing power to analyze the active proteins in smallpox and screen approximately 35 million molecules to find drugs that will target these harmful proteins, and effectively treat or prevent smallpox infections [Smart Mobs]
8:29:50 PM
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Cyborglogging. Resistance is futile...
Forget Moblogging - Try Cyborglogging!. Cyborg Logs and Collective Stream of (De)Consciousness Capture for Producing Attribution-free Informatic Content Such as Cyborglogs by Steve Mann
"Various forms of apparatus for a new kind of wiki or blog (weblog) are described. In particular, ways of bringing together a collective deconsciousness are presented. The systems works with CyborgLogs (cyborglogs or "glogs") from a community of portable computer users, or it can also be used with a mixture of portable (handheld or wearable), mobile (automotive, boat, van, or utility vehicle), or base-station (home, office, public space, etc.) systems. The system enables a community to exist without conscious thought or effort on the part of the individual participants. Because of the participants' ability to constantly experience the world through the apparatus, the apparatus can behave as a true extension of the participants' mind and body, giving rise to a new kind of collective experience. In other embodiments, the system may operate without the need for participants to bear any kind of technological prosthesis....
This article pertains to a collaborative communications system that may have components installed on or within a user's body (portable), on or in a vehicle (mobile), or on or in an environment (building or fixed structure) where users may exist." [First Monday] [The Shifted Librarian ...you will be glogged. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
8:26:18 PM
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Fuel cells to power future laptops to keep Wi-Fi flowing: Intel Capital and others have invested in Neah, a company that plans to make fuel cell-based batteries with stable, less hot reactions than competitors that could have three times the longevity of today's laptop battery. My iBook's 4+ ampere hour (AH) battery, which I gather is about 50+ watt hours (WH) (watts over 12.8 volts equals amps), gives me about three to four hours of carefully husbanded use or two hours of playing a DVD with the screen brightness up. I've tested an external NCharge battery from Valence weighing just over three pounds which has 10 AH or 128 WH and costs about $300. This NCharge battery uses conventional technology; the fuel-cell battery would fit in an existing drive bay while ostensibly reducing weight as well (though that's not spelled out). [via Dana Blankenhorn] [80211b News]
8:22:30 PM
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New Energy Device?. I believe that sooner or later we'll be switching over to totally different energy production devices. Not burning old dinosaurs, but rather drawing a charge from the quantum field, or something along those lines. And there has been no lack of people who seemed to have invented over-unity devices. But either somebody managed to buy off or murder ALL of them, or they didn't really work when put under scrutiny. So it is with some caution that I pass on news about 'free' energy devices. But Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project has his head screwed on fairly well, and even though he likes being the center of attention, what he presents is normally very solid. A while back he set up a company, Space Energy Access Systems, for the purpose of locating and marketing such devices. And he believes he has something now. See transcript of an interview.
"It's not very big at all. I picked it up - you can pick it up with one hand. Took it out actually on a sidewalk. This device gathered, very passively, less than one watt of power from the environment - I won't say how it was done, I'm not allowed to at this point - and the machine started up. It generated hundreds of watts of power in usable form. We hooked this up ourselves, so there was no mystery about it. We even selected the things to hook up to this thing. It ran a 300-watt light bulb, a 100-watt light bulb, a stereo and an oscillating fan with an electric motor, all at the same time with literally no artificial manmade input of power."
I hope it stands up to further scrutiny. Getting rid of the oil economy would change everything. [Ming the Mechanic]
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. Carl Sagan said that I belive.
5:26:36 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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Modern Ruins is a site that features collections of photos of dead theme-parks, highways, factories and other recent ruins, from the site of the 64 World's Fair to the Bay Area MarineLand that became the Oracle Campus. 
