Bringing down the House : People cared deeply about the inner workings of the House of Reps surrounding Monday’s failed bill… their website bowed under the attention.

My friend Seth (of zombie infocalypse infamy). who has been working on content and community media for our educational laptops, has just started a part-time internship with Yochai Benkler’s new research group, and migrated his blog to this server.  Welcome, Seth!  We’re lucky to still have him at OLPC.

Infoseek: Finally, people visiting this blog are searching for some fascinating things:

- “things you never knew existed”
- “the desire to understand”
- The c’t Wikipedia comparison post (still popular even in other languages)

and my favorite,

- how does a hair dryer electrocute you

Don’t get me wrong, I like Boyish Orator’s style, and give him a leg up over Her Royal Cleverness, but don’t stay up nights worrying about the future difference to world peace their differential election would make (other things keep me up, even in politics), and not because I don’t think peace a devastatingly important realm for immediate change.

At any rate, Lessig taped a Barackish paean, and Ball and Prime started simulscribing in gobby. Gobby sessions exert a gravitational pull on me and soon I was transcribing myself, to exercise day-cramped hands — though I would never have listened to the piece otherwise. You can read the result of our labours.

The promise of making a set of ideas more accessible and revisitable is an infinitely better reason to divest oneself of twenty minutes of life than amusement or boredom… Which makes me wonder why we don’t see dotsub everywhere, at least among the sj crowd of one. Maybe it just needs a gobby plugin, or a way to find two friends and start transcribing in tandem. I’m even feeling the itch to ride a tandem bike or sidecar. Ach. Time for a seaweed shower.