Posted on April 1st, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, popular demand, indescribable.
Auntimame has an interesting XO peripherals site, and while I’d like to see us set up an official cut-rate store, it’s nice to see this getting off the ground. Some of the gear there gives new meaning to the word “awesome”. A green USB-latching XO viewfinder? Yes, please…
Posted on February 5th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Blogroll, metrics, chain-gang, popular demand.
First things first. I’m no no-holds-barred Obaman like Larry Lessig.
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.
Posted on October 26th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, Glory, glory, glory.
Wikijunior has been quietly developing a number of great books since its founding, and has branched out into many languages.
It needs more editors and commentators; unlike most of the rest of wikidom, its editors are a bit separate from its audience, and its audience is often not active online.
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, Uncategorized.
Peter Gelzinis of the Boston Herald opines that Star Simpson was looking for attention when she was threatened and arrested yesterday at Logan for her homemade outfit. Nothing unusual; he and Michele McPhee are competing to see who can be most offensive about the affair.
But he provides a quote from one of the policemen who considered killing her that makes my blood run cold.
“A couple of things struck me,” the state cop said, “I thought about what a burst of machine gun fire might do to other people in the area. And then, of course, if it had been a real device, what those bullets would have done to everyone after the explosion.”[1]
… …
…
Posted on October 27th, 2006 by j.
Categories: chain-gang, %a la mod.
Borat’s Friend Space:
Borat has 257073 friends.
Update: now slowed down to 484286 friends, 16 months later. talk about pan-flashes.
Welcome to my country. The country of Internets.
Posted on September 6th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is one graft-happy congressman. Of course as any Tammany lad could tell you, graft is only natural… Stevens is the only actively blocking a recent bill supporting strong transparency of the use of government funds — as I understand it, the bill mandates that any project or organization that receives funds would have an entry on a website that specified the purpose and dates of the funds.
Stevens placed an anonymous hold on the bill ‘for [indefinite] consideration‘, in accordance with Senate procedures, but a call to other Senators to deny they had been responsible for the block quickly winnowed the field of potential blockers.
The idea that not having this level of basic transparency is an option — something to debate seriously — is almost as embarrassing as the idea that some of the pork handed out around the US (including the $200M+ bridge Sen. Stevens snagged last year, and the Big Dig many times over) is allowed to continue — over active opposition by members of these bodies pointing out the waste involved. A system built on social censure and acquiescense as much as formal rules is only as good as its second-bravest member.
As for Stevens? Well, my father liked to say of such people, “By the time a man is forty, he is responsible for his face. This man does not have a good face.”
Posted on August 24th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.
Ross Mayfield pointed out to me just after Wikimania that the Enterprise 2.0 article had been deleted. He pointed me to an old deletion debate, which drew only a handful of negative comments and a deletion for being a neologism. I didn’t pay enough attention at the time, or I would have caught the mistake right away… I checked the last content of the page, performed a history and page undeletion into his user-space, and returned to vacation.
Wikipedia isn’t a good place to define neologisms. Plainly against the rules — Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and not the first place a controversial analysis or interpretation should be published. And “Enterprise 2.0″ feels, to anyone who lives outside of the west coast and doesn’t deal with enterprise software all day, like a term whose lifespan can be measured in technology cycles if not in months. If I go write a paper entitled “Moving Towards Education 2.0“, everyone will know what I mean [and I may get a citable publication out of it], even though most of them won’t have seen the phrase before. But it’s “… 2.0″ that will be remembered as a generic term in 20 years; noone will still be saying “Education 2.0″ except as part of VC-themed parlor games.
Which is a long way of saying that I didn’t feel bad about leaving the E-2.0 saga without more than a cursory investigation. On the other hand, Wikipedia is a place to document the history of terms and ideas, and in the back of my mind, this felt like a good example to prove the rule of the progress of the “… 2.0″ meme. Tonight, I discovered a wealth of bloggers who had jumped onto the article’s deletion as a) an affront to Web 2.0dom, b) an attack on some theoretically-coherent enterprise community by some theoretically-coherent Wikipedia community, c) indicative of a larger Wikipedia disease which Someone Should Stop, and/or d) worth cursing and fuming about.
Interesting. Note to self : “anyone can edit” and “hundreds of thousands of people are Wikipedians ” are ideas that haven’t percolated very far, yet; though many people have heard them.
As a result, I went back to look at the deletion debate. And realized the latest deletion had been a mistake. So, I undeleted the article and listed it for a new deletion discussion. You can see that discussion here.
I’m going to post a set of instructions for all of you bloggers, on How To Criticize Wikipedia — so that you can do it productively if you want to. Wikipedia is one of those rare communities where eloquence, discussion, and an idea about how things can be better can lead to an immediate improvement in process and content.
Sidenotes for the process fiends among you :
Next up : constructive criticism
Posted on June 7th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.
God bless Phil S. and his department’s sense of humor. Where do these paranoid tendencies come from? I hear they can sweep entire organizations and countries in a trice. Hmmmmm.
Posted on April 5th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.
Check out the Global Voices/Reuters teamup
tonight — starting right now — as seven mainstream media panelists
are joined by five Mid-east GV bloggers to discuss whether the “:real” Iraqi story is being told by the media. There will be streaming audio and a live online chat available for the two-hour special discussion.
Reuters calls it the “Reuters Iraq Newsmaker debate“. I’m guessing the MSM will be taken down a few notches, but I would love to hear what Reuters’ Iraq bureau chief Alistair MacDonald and Guardian photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad have to say.
Posted on April 5th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.
Come wikify your night with a [local group] of entrepreneurs and wikiphiles. The second Boston Wiki Wednesday gathering is happening tonight, properly the first week of the month this time.
Where : at Smile Thai in Harvard Square (12-14 Eliot St).
When : at 7pm
Who : anyone who has ever contemplated deleting an entire wiki page.
Call to RSVP, or for more information. 529 4266 (617).
