The Longest Now

World wide words… with a brief but well-referenced entry in wiktionary. 

Thorpes …

Check this solar carrier bag.   Remember the world’s finest turtle face-mask.  And forget not, while in the Christmas spirit, the joys of EVEST v.3 and all its kith.  Your relatives, young and old, will salute you.

Glorious gadgetry? …

The size of downloads has been increasing at a record clip. 
Downloads have been growing in size since the inception of the
concept… today I direct your attention to Wikipedia and Wikimedia
downloads.  Unavailable as torrents, but rather only via http, the
full downloads at 2+GB each are unwieldy even for people who run
downloads over their broadband connections at night while they
sleep.  Is WP dump size growing faster than avergae pipe
throughput to homes and workplaces?  (yes)  What can be done
about this? 

How about… shipping hard drives to people who want them?  Guaranteed 5-day delivery; for a reasonable fee (perhaps $80 for a drive + shipping + overhead?)…

Download size exponentiation …

Notes…

http://gayrepublicanmetalheadwiccans.org/

Randyf, Amanda/mal, michael, chris, j, erica…
shekhar, skyler, manon (u. chicago, admin computing, via shekhar)
ronaldo (hls, working for prof on how bloggers should be treated for
1st amendment)  — listen to/speak to some bloggers…  rob woolf.  m. leach.

Step 1 : Throw a party.

Step 2 : Make it really, really big.  10,000 people?  Almost there.

Step 3 : Don’t hold back.  Invite everyone;  make it a spectacle of an event. 

Step 4 : Only ask for 1/3 of the total cost of the event from the world
at large.  If this doesn’t come to a few million dollars, you’ve
done something wrong.

Step 5 : Put up a nice progress bar on your website to show people how well fundraising is going.

I guess it helps if you’re a major international body working towards the peaceful betterment of mankind. 

WSIS I reflections

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/special/informationsociety/template10.do
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/special/informationsociety

How to hold really big fundraisers …

Jessamyn gave a rocking talk at the Internet Librarian gathering out on
the left coast just this Monday.  Wish I could have seen it! 
Her design skills keep improving with her patter; soon she will have
even the non-librarian world beating down her door.

Beauty and the Jess …

“>

On Saturday, Boston was
chosen by an 11-person jury to be the host city for next summer’s Wikimedia
conference (aka Wikimania
2006).  The week-long event on global
collaboration and free knowledge is being sponsored primarily by HLS’s
Berkman Center for
Internet & Society.   Over 50
speakers and 600 attendees from around the planet are expected to
attend – an energetic mix of Wikimedia contributors;
wiki maintainers and developers; academic researchers in law,
technology, and sociology; and librarians, educators, and
entrepreneurs. 

You can see part of last year’s program and
schedule on the old Wikimania
website.  This year will be even more amazing; to help out, sign up on our volunteer page.

The decision followed a month-long bid
process that culminated in a deadlocked jury and a week of
overtime
deliberation. 
The two finalist bids, for Boston
and Toronto,
were both so strong that a jury vote earlier this month was
inconclusive.  After asking for more information from both
bids and from
the global Wikimedia community, a second vote this past weekend was
5–4 in favor of Boston,
with 2 abstentions.

The Toronto bid
included a generous offer of from the University of Toronto’s

Knowledge Media Design
Institute, including free use of their new Bahen Centre for Information Technology,
and was supported by an impressive local team.  

 
The Boston bid is
supported by its own local team; by the Berkman
Center (offering space, funding
and enthusiasm); by the MIT Media
Lab‘s electronic
publishing group (offering to host part of the event); and by
many smaller local
groups of the Boston event in various ways.

Boston to host Wikimania 2006, after close contest …

Boston will host Wikimania 2006.  Details to come.

Boston it is …

…they’re planning for disaster by training the community to be more self-reliant (and going back to centuries-old roots in the process).  How did I miss this when it was first announced?

My karma’s rubbing off on Boston …

Care of a German-Korean collaboration. You can add items to a map layer,
have resulting content stored in the db associated with WP articles,
and have tags show up on the map with the article’s name. Then you can
add/remove these items by layer…)

Click on the map to see the layered world-map itself.

Awesome Geomap integration with WP …

Replace Wikipedia with media or The Media and you’ll be all set.  Let’s rock.

Hold onto your seats. …

Jan-Henrik Anderson’s brightly colored art depicting quarks and similarly-sized subatomic particles is a glory to behold.  Starting from the shared superstructure of a unit superquadric ellipsoid, he has built some magical things, and intends to continue in the same fashion.

Superquadric ellipsoidal beauty …

Sometime after 11:50
last night, I received a pointer to a delightful paper on medieval
mathematics
of the RaLBaG. 
Two charming stories in one night, one
library staffer, and a Simonson!  Now the question is : did the
story about the internal circumfrence and external diameter come from
him directly, or from Nehemiah as suggested in the History of Pi?

The art of being 11:50, and a RaLBaG …

Time for a hallowe’en recipe contest.

They’re Just Land Shrimp… …

Lots of great advice and suggestions, for getting around housing
crunches, language barriers, and Cambridge/US/North-America founder
effects.  Also for coping with iCampus, ePublishing, press
accreditation, and design.  Special thanks to eGeorge, Beauty’s,
and Ilya’s extra dose of enthusiasm.  

IRC sadly failed us, largely because we had a single functioning
machine doing double-duty as shared whiteboard-display and IRC
monitoring, and we lost our connection before we left.  (Sorry, dk & tea)

Come to the Berkman Center tonight at 8pm to support and plan a local Wikimania bid for next summer.  The initial congress last summer in Frankfurt brought together 350 students, academics, entrepreneurs and other community members for 3 days of energetic collaboration.  It was a joyful and productive event.

Next summer, Berkman hopes to host the sequel.  Wikipedians in
town are meeting tonight to discuss what a conference in  Boston —
home to over 55 colleges and 150,000 students — would be
like.   Help us brainstorm about how the congress could take
advantage of what our city has to offer, how we could make this a great
experience for people from all over the world, and how it could enrich
local programs already in
progress. 

Some multilingual thoughts on a sunny day:  a UN history of massively parallel interpretation, and some old gathered advice on breaking into simultaneous interpreting.