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Saturday, September 7, 2002
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You should read this whole article, and I'd reprint the whole thing here, but that is rude (I'd forward it on email in a second tho--blogs slow me down sometimes, I think), but instead I'll just hit the high points:
Steve Gillmor: "RSS is an XML syndication standard authored by Dave Winer of SOAP fame, and currently mired in a standards struggle that extends to even what the acronym stands for." [Scripting News]
[...]
But wait, you say, innovation is not dead. There's peer-to-peer, the mobile client, Weblogs. No, says Hollywood gatekeeper Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association and his trusty sidekick Hillary Rosen of the RIAA (which should stand for Restrict Innovation Association of Americans). There is no peer-to-peer; it's property-to-property. No, you misunderstand: It's fare use, not fair. No, you can't have it your way; it's our way or the highway.
That leaves Weblogs, the last bastion of free speech. Or is it? Once again, we are held hostage by the gatekeepers. The strategy: Shut down the peer protocols and slap a dongle on content creation. The vehicle: our old friend Internet Explorer and its DRM (digital rights management) checkpoints.
[...]
As Don Box discovered and Jon Udell shared with the Weblog community in pseudo-code (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/09/04.html#a396):
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
RSS is an XML syndication standard authored by Dave Winer of SOAP fame, and currently mired in a standards struggle that extends to even what the acronym stands for. Winer's Radio UserLand Weblog authoring tool both aggregates and emits RSS objects that can be consumed by other Weblogs in a modular and deeply viral way. But IE's crummy editing tools slow down the cycle by forcing bloggers into repetitious cut-and-paste fests to keep the ideas flowing.
The result: competition between a virtuous cycle and a vicious one. Microsoft wants to drive users to Office and its rich-client DRM hooks, to SharePoint Team Services and its IIS-centralized DRM hooks, to the .Net run time and its unified storage DRM hooks. And let's be honest: I want my MTV. I'll sell myself down the river eventually if no one else steps up to the plate.
I can definitely relate to this. I've developed both an e-learning and a worker-assessment tool for business, and I'd be flying off into the stratosphere, but that these very issues are slowing me down. And that is why I watch what Dave Winer is doing so closely.
How much more investment would it take to build a blogging editor on top of this stack, one free of DRM limitations? And who better to partner with than Apple, the last remaining engine of innovation? Jobs' Pixar studios leveraged Linux and p-to-p rendering farms to send Disney to the showers in the animation playoffs, after all.
Whether it's Sun's Linux boxes serving the edge, or Apple's Xserver in the cloud or iPods on the hip, a DRM-free zone is possible. Let's face it: There will be a DRM solution. Jobs has a foot in both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and McNealy has shown resiliency in the face of the IBM-Microsoft axis.
They don't call it a representative democracy for nothing.
http://staging.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/09/09/020909opcurve.xml?Template=/storypages/printfriendly.html
8:23:50 PM 
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Since I am a fan of C. Douglas Lummis and his ideas on radical democracy, my main question for this proposal is: Is it radical enough?
This is the Lummis book:
Radical Democracy by C. Douglas Lummis (Paperback - September 1997) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-7164761-6680907
kuro5hin.org has a neat way of handling long articles, with the abstract below, and the longer piece beneath it. With there were an abstract feature in RSS and Radio Userland, to tell you the truth. An author field would be nice too. Anyway, reading the entire well-thought out proposal is satisfying in a way I can't explain, except to say, hey, go read it. Plain language. Simple system. Possibly brilliant, if it is radical enough (radical as in ROOT).
Miasma
Practical democracy for the 21st century. Feeling disenfranchised? Sick of contributing a measly few bits per year to your state's "democratic" process? Is your legislature a bunch of professional smiling faces? Do you get a hint they might be serving big business or other lobby needs? Do you laugh, or cringe when they are called your "representatives"? Might there be a barrier to entry into the political process, perchance? When did your views last get raised in formal debate? Do you even conceive that your interests might affect policy? It doesn't have to be like this. Here is straightforward proposal for practical, truly representative democracy, which depends on just a modest amount of proven late-20th-century technology. [kuro5hin.org]
8:08:25 PM
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Blaspheming the in the temple, but what the hell, this article says it all anyway. Welcome to our PoMo Moment of Ultimate Media Farcahola! (I made that word up)
Miasma <---for once the bad smell isn't me
9/11: Enough, Already!. In the current issue of New Times LA there is a story by Jill Stewart entitled Enough, Already!. This, like many of articles that have been appearing and will continue to appear over the next week or so, is about America's reaction to 9/11 one year on. The difference between this article and most others is that this one tells of how screwed up we have become in the past year, not how great we are. [kuro5hin.org]
[...]
Indeed, I say without shame to America's ever-growing, increasingly troubling and loudly throbbing Cult of Nine Eleven, "For God sakes, get a grip!"
Get a grip, people, before this unholy rapture gets its grip on you.
[...]
Frank Megna, founder of Working Stage Theater in West Hollywood, who directed the currently running play The Emissary, about a young Jewish man who flees New York after his mom and his rabbi die on the same day (not to 9/11, thank God), says Americans are addicted to acting out for the media. And when it comes to September 11, he's sick of it, just like me.
"After Baby Jessica got trapped in that hole, private disasters became mini-series for TV, and private citizens began playing to the cameras," says Megna. "The 9/11 victims think they are getting closer to the truth by baring it all, but what we are seeing is a whole distortion of what they are actually experiencing. It's really more like a farce."
3:01:21 PM
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An NRA for Communication Technology. In a recent discussion with a number of influential people in the digital freedom community, and inspired by a recent speech by Lawrence Lessig (who also participated in this discussion), the idea of an advocacy group, analogous to lobbying groups such as the National Rifle Association, was discussed. The purpose of this group would be to provide a counterbalance to groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, by presenting lawmakers with the pro-digital freedom perspective. I was asked to produce an initial draft for a statement of purpose for such an organization, and I would like to take advantage of the Kuro5hin hive-mind to obtain some initial feedback on this short piece of text. [kuro5hin.org]
2:49:38 PM
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a klog apart has professionals thinking like composition teachers, again! That is just SO badass cool!
(see previous post a klog apart: Why Johnny Can't Klog)
I'm quoting High Context below (let's see if that macro thingy works) instead of a klog apart because, as I said in a previous post, the ideas spun together are SO rich and multifaceted, AND ground-breaking that at least five of the more unimaginative careerist composition scholars could make tenure just mining nit-picky articles stolen from ideas in the two a klog apart posts I've put on here alone.
Bravo Folks! I watch with bait breath.
Miasma <--a bit fishy
The Non-writer Blog. Phil Wolff has lots of ideas on how to enable non-writers to engage in and benefit from blog-like activity. He has grouped them in three general areas: Capture experiences and thoughts differently, Prompt with Structure, and Enterprise system streaming.
Definitely worth checking out.
We are in the process of designing a new intranet for our office and one of things I want to explore is creating a blog-like view (reverse chronological order) of activities, documents, meetings, etc. so that an employee can capture a history of their work even if they are not a strong writer. This would be in addition to the normal writing of entries. Phil's stuff provides a lot of possibilities to explore.
I'll be posting more information here for feedback as we get a design fleshed out. [High Context]
1:06:14 AM
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I'm adding High Context to my list of blogs to read at least once a week or more. So many times I just read and nod my head the whole time, feeling like a puppet, yes, Yes, YES!
Miasma
Fostering Change Without Getting Fired. I found this post over on Steven Vore's Weblog:
Sean Murphy in reply to Corporate Culture-Shifting: "Changing the culture is something I am battling with right now. We are trying to implement a Knowledge Centered Support environment, where everyone collaborates and shares for the benefit of the team. On a good day, I get comments like "They shoot collaborators, don't they?", but most often I feel like the message is treated as white noise. Upper management has not really bought into making the culture shift because they keep whipping the operational managers to meet numbers. How is it possible to get the shift to happen? It makes logical sense to a lot of use, but change is scary and seems like more effort will be required. I would love to hear from others on how they have effectively engineered change in their culture in a timely manner. Thanks."
It's a common refrain coming from the front lines. Suggestions, fellow culture-changers?
You may want to check out Tempered Radicals by Debra Meyerson. She writes about the experiences of people who have decided to create change within a work place that doesn't match their values rather than leave the company. She focuses mostly on creating change on issues such as diversity, fair-trade products, family-friendly work hours, etc. However, I think the strategies that she discusses are just as valid and useful for trying to move an organization towards a more knowledge-based organizational culture.
Her key themes are: leading by example, small early wins, turning threats into change opportunities, and taking a long view. No quick fixes, I'm afraid. [High Context]
12:44:08 AM
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If you are on or near a college campus and get a chance to get to one of the V-Day performances mentioned below, don't miss it! I may be biased, but I think student directors or grad projects or whatever other kinds of grassroots collaborations behind these projects make them very rich, better than the celebrity performances, and others have told me this too. I saw the tape of Eve doing it all herself, and I just kept hearing the far richer performances of our own college students doing it. Sold out three nights, and even added an extra show the last night, because people were lined up around the building and down the street the last night of the show.
Miasma
"The Vagina Monologues". Eve Ensler reads from her Obie Award-winning book, which celebrates female sexuality and gives voice to the deepest fantasies and fears of real women. [Salon.com]
Celebrated as the bible for a new generation of women, "The Vagina Monologues" has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses. It has inspired a dynamic grass-roots movement (V-Day) to stop violence against women. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning masterpiece gives voice to women's deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who reads it will ever look at a woman's body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.
Included in this special edition are testimonials -- both joyous and heartbreaking -- from young women who have performed "The Vagina Monologues" at their colleges for V-Day, Feb. 14, to raise money for organizations fighting to protect women.
12:35:16 AM
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2003
Miasma.
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The Karma of Literature... BookCrossing.com