Rant: When Are Permalinks Coming to Email Newsletters?

Here's my rant of the day -- when Are we going to get email newsletters with permalinks?  I keep seeing things in emails that I get that I think "Damn.  I'd blog that but its too much work".  You have to go to their site and find it and then copy the link.  Now it's not really that much work but it would be a LOT more convenient if there was simply a permalink on each item.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

For some particularly excellent commentary about Creative Commons licenses, check out Denise M. Howell's Bag and Baggage, one of the snappiest law-and-tech blogs out there. Denise chronicles her own experience applying one of our licenses to her blog and addresses readers' questions about the licenses, among other things.

As our chairman has pointed out in his own blog, it's just this sort of community participation and reporting that the Creative Commons model will rely on. So thanks to Bag and Baggage and the many others out there revving up the discussion going.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

Clay Shirky, prominent web thinker and investor, has released essays from his email newsletter NEC (Networks, Economics, and Culture) under a Creative Commons attribution license. Here's how to subscribe to the list if you haven't already. [Creative Commons: weblog]

The average activity for a Web user in November 2002, as reported by Nielsen//NetRatings Inc. [CyberAtlas]

E-tailers thrived this season despite a shorter shopping season and a weakened economy, say analysts, a sure sign of stronger e-tail seasons to come. [CyberAtlas]

Internet becomes relied upon medium for millions, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. [internetnews.com: Top News]

Clay Shirky's written up some findings from a brainstorming session he hosted in NYC last month that I attended. The meeting was a face-to-face affair, but virtually every attendee had a laptop with an WiFi card, and Clay set up a web-based chat for us to play with while we talked. A giant display at the front of the room showing the running chatter, and it created a really dense dialog that was very fun and productive.

Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at least some material of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Clay!) [Boing Boing Blog]