Entries Tagged 'groupmind' ↓

So, here’s the problem: I’ve been using Syndirella for all my news aggregating. It’s a great program, and although Dmitry doesn’t really have the time or enthusiasm to upgrade it much further, it is open source, so someone might pick up the slack. (Fingers crossed.) Since I’ve been using Syndirella, I’ve been reading the web with my browser a lot less often, so when I come across an interesting site, I grab its feed, rather than put it into my blogroll. I’ve got about 300 blogs in my feed list and I’d like to show them on my blogroll, but I don’t feel like copying and pasting all 300 links into the form at blogrolling.com.

One of the things Syndirella does well is export its feed list to OPML and OCS. Blogrolling.com supports some OPML interaction for those people using Radio. (Maybe I’m just not understanding, but I don’t think this applies to any other blogging software.) I’m looking for an automated way to make my blogroll and my feedlist mirror one another in Moveable Type (or Blogger, or whatever) and in Syndirella (or FeedReader or Amphetadesk or NewzCrawler or whatever), probably using OPML as an intermediary, but without requiring me to muck around with any of those “P” languages (Perl, PHP, Python) in which I am utterly incompetent. A tall order?

Hi, Dan,

The book, along with this chance at a type of collaboration you are offering to your readers, is going to be a great experiment.

For your Part III, Chapter 8, I think the Agonist story you wrote about earlier provokes some interesting questions for “Making the News”. At the beginning of the new Gulf War, Sean-Paul Kelley, the guy behind The Agonist, made a decision to sit in front of his computer as much as he possibly could, aggregating news from websites, radio, TV and any other information sources he could get his hands on. He’s a graduate student down in Texas, with a wife who reads and writes Russian. For those of us without the time or the inclination to hunt for nuggets of truth amidst all the bias and web-slag, his site was a real find. I’m not sure how many of us staked out his site at the beginning of the hostilities, but I don’t think any of us had any illusions that his sources were anything other than other media outlets; the value he provided was collection and presentation. His role wasn’t much different than Paula Zahn’s, except that his sources were more varied and I doubt he smiled as much when he reported enemy deaths. Does anyone believe that Paula herself is developing primary sources? Isn’t it clear that Zahn is presenting her colleague in Qatar, who is presenting the guy embedded with a particular unit, who is then presenting to us what the military allows him to say?

Perhaps people visiting the site later believed that Sean-Paul’s mysterious references to “little birdies” or “unnamed” sources were bonafides, but these lapses in attribution can just as easily be chalked up to Sean-Paul’s personal voice — humor and an air of espionage. My assumption was that some of his sources were from reader emails; in fact, half the value of Kelley’s site was the wealth of comments from readers: they verified reports, suggested new sources, added new items, and contributed breaking news during the breaks Sean-Paul’s biological nature required of him. Give it ten years of development and research and Google News may be capable of providing this service for the next Gulf War, without the bathroom requirements.

Blogs aren’t “journalism” — at least not in the American “objective” sense; to judge them by the standards of professional journalism is to do both a disservice. Blogs depend on journalism, serving as an echo chamber for the good stuff, a debunker for the garbage, and a collection point for the stuff which may have been overlooked in our info-glutted culture. For a pro, mis-attributing or claiming another’s work as your own is both unethical and proof that they are not doing their job properly. For an amateur, its more of an ego-stroke than anything harmful, akin to the guy at the water-cooler using Ebert‘s words to describe what he “heard” about the movie he hasn’t yet seen. “Plagiarism” is the term that’s being tossed about, but I think plagiarism would require that Kelley attributed the work to himself, which I don’t believe he did, any more than Al Gore attributed to himself the creation of the Internet.

As for the charge that Sean-Paul was “stealing” information from Stratfor: that’s a tricky one. Can information be stolen? Are thoughts, ideas and knowledge property which can be owned by one person? Once Stratfor releases the information to its subscribers, can Stratfor rightfully determine who those subscribers may or may not relay that information to? It also leads into the question of “fair use“: how much of Stratfor’s text could Sean-Paul copy-and-paste as fair use? Many bloggers — Lisa Rein comes immediately to mind — copy entire articles and save them to their own websites in order to comment on them; Kelley took snippets and clips. According to the developing code of weblogger ethics, he should have attributed the excerpts to Stratfor. When it was pointed out to him, he apologized, then immediately began attributing every article, went back into his archives to attribute all un-attributed information and worked out an amicable arrangement with Stratfor for using some of their material.

There are some ethical lapses here, but nothing horrible like the recent spate of professional newspapers quoting other newspapers without even an attempt at independent verification, as in the (overblown) flap about General William Wallace’s assertion that “enemy tactics had been ‘a bit’ different from what was war-gamed against beforehand”. In failing to verify the quote with the General, many newspapers repeated someone’s original error and left out “a bit”, suggesting that the US armed forces had been porrly trained and were in danger due to foolish assumptions. And it is certainly nothing like Fox News partisanly using its Times Square news ticker to taunt war protesters with insults and slurs.

Many of the people who posted heated rants on Kelley’s “The Agonist” comments board said that, in light of the revelations that he had “stolen” content, they could no longer trust his information or rely upon his data. This is a touchy-feely reaction with no basis in reality: no one has questioned the veracity or reliability of any of Kelley’s or Stratfor’s reports, merely whether Kelley properly credited them. This has no bearing on reliability. Every major newspaper has a “Corrections” column running nearly every day, and consisting mainly of corrections to misattributions of photographs, authors and sources. Few people would claim that the New York Times is no longer reliable because its editors forgot a photographer’s byline. (In this respect, conscientious bloggers are more like print media in that they frequently correct their mistakes with updates to the original articles or post new entries reporting their errors; contrast this with the lack of corrections in television journalism.)

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this episode, other than it is still very early in the history of this new medium to understand exactly what should be the distinctions between journalists and bloggers and how they should ethically act and interact. I’m sure Gillmor can analyze this better than I can.

Devra posted a heartfelt examination of her “Fear & Anxiety” over the gathering perfect storm of current world events. Jeralyn picked it up over at TalkLeft.

Part of Devra’s fears were based on the contradicition between a “…President who embraces Fundamentalist Christian theology as a guide to governing in Foreign Policy. And who rejects ‘Christian Charity’ as a guide to governing in Domestic Policy.” She continues:

Dean takes this as an example of “…the religious bigotry that seems to underlie Devra’s paranoia…” And this is where I wind up shaking my head in amazement.

Devra, I wouldn’t worry about Dean. He’s a very confused man.

The headline of his site says he’s “Defending the liberal tradition in history, politics, science and philosophy.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be all that clued in on the meaning of liberal. In his blog entry entitled “Who Is Dean?”, he tells us, “Politically, I do not like labeling myself…”, and then after a suitable semi-colon pause, he labels himself, saying: “I consider myself a conservative liberal.”

Some more head-shaking, so I follow his link to his “Are You a Liberal?” entry and I become more certain that he really doesn’t have much of a clue. He takes his definition of a liberal from the dictionary, without even acknowledging that the first definition he quotes for liberal: “Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry” is almost directly contradicted by the same dictionary’s definition of conservative: “Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.”

He’s also very fond of the word “bigot” in all its forms, and he’s very quick to use it against any view which diverges from his. On the “Are You a Liberal?” page, he uses the word more than 20 times, twisting it around until it has lost whatever meaning it may have started with. When a commenter on the post says that the statement, “Homosexuality is a sin” is a bigoted statement, Dean calls him a religious bigot, followed by an immediate appeal to traditional, orthodox, authoritarian attitudes: “Does that mean you think Orthodox and Conservative Jews, the majority of Christians, and the majority of Muslims are all bigots?” If all those fine people believe homosexuality is a sin, then it must be bigotry to oppose them. (I think the Dean disease must be catching: I’ve used “bigot” more times in this article than I probably have in all my life.)

But we’re not done. Dean says that it’s bigoted to call someone a bigot. The proper response to an expression of bigotry is to say, “I respect your beliefs, even if I don’t agree with them.” Gosh. I’ll remember that the next time someone calls me a “cheap Jew bastard,” or my friend an “ass-fucking abomination who deserves to get AIDS.”

Of course his several posts on the main page where he calls the French and Germans “The Axis of Weasels”, then decides that weasels are too noble to be compared to the French — those aren’t bigotry, right? Or where he links to that broad-minded newspaper, The New York Post with its front page photo of the UN Security Council meeting with the French and German ambassadors Photoshopped into weasels– that’s not bigotry, either, right?. Those are free-thinking, liberal views. He has certainly come to his conclusion about the weaseltry of the “Old Europe” by careful analysis of the way things look from the French and German points of view. “I respect your beliefs, even if you are a bunch of cheese- and kraut-eaters.”

Of course this “liberal” is also for war against Iraq — sorry: he’s for the liberation of “the people” of Iraq. These are the same people we’ve starved for 12 years and who we will now proceed to “Shock and Awe” into little bitty smithereens, until we’ve conquered — sorry: “liberated” — their land, handed it over to the oil companies, and then neglected to include any aid for their country’s reconstruction in our budget. (Or was that Afghanistan?)

(Obligatory disclaimer: Saddam is a bad bad man and an illegitimate ruler. He was recently elected in a supposedly democratic manner, where, in fact, the voters had no choice in their input. As opposed to the US, where the majority of voters had no choice in the outcome.)

I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time on this oxy-moronic “conservative liberal” — maybe it’s because he’s abusing a fine philosophy. Or maybe it’s because I’m a bigot.

Or maybe it’s because I understand — truly and deeply — what Devra is talking about. I have taken to heart all the great qualities of this country, believed in them, believed that the deficiencies would be healed, and that one day we would truly be the ideal imagined by the nation’s founders and by every freedom-seeking individual in the world. But lately, the only word to describe my feelings about my country is “heartbroken.”

In an article in the most recent Mother Jones magazine [full article unavaialble on the web], there’s a table which delineates some of the recent acquisitions of organic and natural food producers by some of the biggest conglomerates. It seems that the big food producers have seen the light, and realized that at least some of their customers are interested in natural or organic or meatless foods. So, instead of attempting to build a brand synonymous with trust and purity, they’ve simply bought the companies.

While I’m not a big fan of the corporate world, I’m also not one to believe that corporations are inherently evil. Still, I wish it was easier to find out where your food dollars are going. I love Boca Burgers, but I’m going to have a hard time buying them now, knowing that they’re owned by Kraft, which is in turn owned by Philip Morris.

Since Mother Jones didn’t include the table on their website, I’ve adapted it and posted it here.

Continue reading →

This ex-Sixties radical, now darling of Karl Rove, brings out all the anti-Commie guns in his article on the recent anti-war protests in New York, San Francisco and cities around the world. According to Horowitz, the massive demonstration was nothing but an excuse for the organizers of the event to present speakers who were either Communists or — horrors! — Democrats!

Of course, Horowitz never claims to have been at any of the marches, however, he was able to observe, seemingly the entire event “[as] reported by the unfiltered cameras of C-SPAN.” As a veteran of many demonstrations and protests, and as a player in this media-literate societ, Horowitz should stop being ingenuous in pretending that any media is unfiltered. C-SPAN’s broadcast could be considered unfiltered only if every one of the demonstrators were standing in the exact location of the cameras and could hear and see exactly what the camera reported.

How many of the demonstrators (crowd estimates ranged from “tens of thousands” to 500,000) stood around to listen to the unfiltered speakers “denouncing America as a racist, imperalist monster…”? How many people knew there were speakers like “Imam Mussa from the mosque Masjid al-Islam”, or an unidentified “spokesman for the narco-terrorists in Colombia”? Neither of these speakers appear on the schedule posted at the site of International A.N.S.W.E.R., the putative organizer of the demonstration, and the focus of Horowitz’s claims that this was just a Commie affair. (International A.N.S.W.E.R. is supposed to be a creation of the International Action Center, itself a front organization for the Workers World Party.)

Not only does he categorize the entire crowd as communists, he goes on to say:

He not-as-openly smears Repr. John Conyers for “presenting himself as a patriot and a veteran (he served fifty years ago in Korea)” [italics mine] — as if his service in that war means nothing because it happened 50 years ago. And he smears the more-than-50 percent of the electorate who voted Democrat in the last presidential election, saying:

It must be so simple to live in Horowitz’s world, where the supporters of a pre-emptive strike against a weakened dictator who might, someday, get nuclear weapons (but not against a strong dictator who most likely already has nuclear weapons) are all in the bright shining light of goodness and justice. The people who oppose such a war for so many different reasons are all Jew-hating, anti-American agents of the International Communist Conspiracy. Or as Joe McCarthy, one of his ideological predecessors said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.”

As I drove in to work this morning through suburban Maryland, I noticed — or failed to notice — the American flags which instantaneously materialized everywhere last September 11. The red white and blue sprouted from car windows, clothing, flagpoles, televisions, even radios. “God Bless America.” “United We Stand.” “Remember the Heroes.” It even made its appearance in the form of a tiny little flag on our lawn, placed there by my wife, and now standing tattered and faded among the un-mown grass and the drought-stricken day lilies.

A confirmed cynic, I reveled in the campiness and hokiness of the jingoism of last autumn. I loved the look of confusion which George W. couldn’t wipe from his vapid face. I listened to the forced solemnity with which my friends and relatives told me, “This changes everything.” I stifled laughter as I observed our leaders attempts to rediscover the innocence and unity which permeated the country in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, knowing that this post-modern society is incapable of suppressing the self-awareness which such innocence requires.

The images that haunted me in those days immediately following the attacks were three. I still see the desperate men and women — more of them than we will ever have a full accounting of — who, faced with the impossible choice of death by fire or death by suffocation, and knowing that rescue was not in the cards, gambled on a third option and leapt to their deaths from the triple-digit floors. Cameras turned away, tapes were edited, and people only whispered about the leaps. We never heard about what happened when they hit the ground, so, in my mind, those people remain forever suspended in mid-air, hanging in the sky with the ghost-limbs of the Towers themselves.

And that is the second image which stays with me. I drove by and stepped inside the World Trade Center hundreds of times in my forty-one years. I have a very early memory (perhaps faulty) of visiting the excavations, where my father pointed out to me the massive shapes of the Holland Tunnel tubes laid bare amidst the rock and dirt which were being removed to make way for the deep roots of the towers. The Twin Towers were a yardstick for me: four towers laid end-to-end equalled the distance from my apartment to my school; one-quarter mile high meant that the Apollo astronauts travelled a distance equal to about one-million of the towers. I couldn’t picture a million, but I could certainly picture a stack of towers disappearing into the blue sky. Disappearing into the blue sky…

Now I’m older and living in Maryland, and I make the trip to New York once a month, on average, to see my parents and friends. Sometimes, it might mean extra traffic, but even now, we always make a point of driving up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway because, for a short distance, as we pass under the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, we are driving along the East River where we are afforded a magnificent view of the southern tip of Manhattan. I am always amazed by the scale of the skyline, the way it seems as impressive and eternal as the mountainscapes near my brother-in-law’s house in suburban Seattle. Watching the towers come down that day was akin to watching Mt. Rainier suddenly vanish from the Seattle landscape. The towers were a so-solid presence in my life, a symbol of a decade of progress and of the era when our country had big dreams — of building buildings to the sky, of putting men on the moon, of exploring the ocean floors. Now what small dreams does this country dream of? And first and foremost: how much will those dreams cost?

The third picture which stays with me is of the firefighters — or ironworkers or policemen or whomever — raising the flag over ground zero. All I could think of when I first saw the picture was the self-consciousness of that act. How could they create that tableau without realizing or planning their mimickry of the Marines at Iwo Jima? How could photographers not instinctively point their cameras at the sight, just like tourists coming upon a “Kodak Picture Spot” at Disney World? How could newspapers, swept along in a tide of stars-and-stripes fervor refuse to splash that picture on their front page? And how could so many fail to see that appropriating an image of do-or-die heroism does not make one heroic?

Were the people who set out to reclaim the Trade Center site heroes? Does anyone with a risky job qualify as a hero? The cops and firefighters and EMTs who went rushing into the building with no thought of personal safety, with no idea of the nature of the situation –was it over? was it just starting? — to help rescue the victims and survivors of the attacks — those were heroes without a doubt. The men and women who spent the next six months cleaning and disassembling the ruined structures, amidst a field of smoking iron, body parts and the mundane wreckage of office life — they are most of them virtuous and reverent and dedicated and worthy of respect for taking on and completing such a horrific job — but “heroes”? Use a term too lightly and it loses all its meaning.

On Iwo Jima, there were bombs falling, Japanese soldiers who had already vowed to die on the island firing at the Marines from bunkers beneath the ground. The men of Easy Company slogged up a mountain of bloodied volcanic ash to raise the flag on the highest point of the island so that every Marine would see that victory was near and continue their seemingly-hopeless fight. Three of the six flag-raisers were killed by the enemy within a week. The other three maintained for the rest of their lives that they were not heroes — that the only heroes were the dead friends they’d left behind.

The photo of the WTC moment is as false as the multi-culti recasting of the same image in bronze, where the some of the white men raising the flag were replaced by Latinos and African- and Asian-Americans — real men replaced by a metaphor, just as our retribution was aimed at a metaphor. The photo of that moment is as false as our leaders’ deciding to wage war on Iraq, then scrambling for reasons to justify the inevitable carnage. It is as false as our projecting expectations of greatness on the mediocrity who inhabits the White House, merely because he happens to inhabit the White House during a time of national crisis — and doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth, doesn’t cry for his Mommy, doesn’t do anything criminal, and doesn’t immediately launch our entire newkyoolar arsenal at whoever is “evil” or an “enemy combatant” today.

Although my company suggested I do, I’m not wearing red, white and blue today — not because of any disrespect to the thousands who died so senselessly, but because I want to show my friends, neighbors, relatives, co-workers that this country does not speak with one monolithic voice. I love my country, but I hate what the opportunist hypocrites who control it have done in my name over the past year. I would gladly die defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but those who would ask me to defend it are even now dismantling it, removing its protections one by one, until the only right that will remain is the right to carry a gun.

This screed could go on forever. I could talk about my disappointment in the Democrats who have remembered the first part of the term “loyal opposition” while completely forgetting the latter half. I could rant about the likelihood that Nike, Coke and General Electric are sponsoring some of today’s memorial services, with one eye on the flag and one eye on the up-and-coming Afghani market. I could talk about the rotten-to-the-core corporate culture whose putrescent slime-trail leads to the White House and to whatever subpoena-free hole in which our Iraqi-oil-tainted Vice President is cowering.

Instead, I’ll go home and sit with my wife on our driveway and look at our little flag and think about the thousands of New York dead and the hundreds of Pentagon dead and the dozens of Pennsylvania dead and the American servicemen and reporters dead in Afghanistan and the Oklahoma dead and the Afghani dead and the Palestinians and the Israelis and the hundreds of thousands in the original “ground zero” and the millions dying of starvation and of AIDS and of the effects of global warming… I’ll think of my nieces and nephews and how, I have suddenly realized, I don’t envy them the world they are inheriting.

I was in Seattle a couple of years ago with a co-worker for the annual Thunder Lizard Macromedia conference. It was a good show at a good time. Flash usage was expanding, and developers were starting to realize that Flash could be used for more than Wow splash screens and cartoons. Many of the presenters we saw have since gone on to write books about Flash and Web Development: Kelly Goto, Todd Purgason, Hillman Curtis.

The company put us up at the Renaissance Madison Hotel, a pretty tony place for me, but I wasn’t paying, the company was. (Of course, nowadays, no one is paying!) The conference was being held at the Washington State Convention Center, just a short walk from the hotel through Freeway Park [Quicktime]. It’s a strange little park, full of nooks and crannies, concrete benches, boxes and waterfalls, built on a lid over I-5, the 10-lane interstate highway that runs from the Mexican border in California through Seattle and up to the Canadian border.

As we walked through Freeway Park each day, I thought about what a nice use of land it was. The roar of the waterfalls and the thick stands of trees blocked out the noise of the highway below us. The air was freshened by the foliage, and the dozens of nooks and crannies made for some quiet intimate spaces in which to relax. All in all, it just added to my impression of Seattle as an accessible, human-sized city.

Of course, my perception of the park is colored by my being 6’4″ (193 cm), a healthy white male, with a sheltered place to sleep at night, no substance dependencies, no (serious) psychological traumas, no (major) diminshment of my senses. The complete opposite of RaeAnn Champaco, a deaf and mute homeless woman who was stabbed to death in the restroom of Freeway Park at 10:15 am on January 18 of this year.

Even if she could have screamed, no one would have heard her above the roar of the waterfalls I found so soothing. Even if she had been capable of hearing her attacker coming, she might not have been able to escape him through the frequent twists and turns and sudden ledges I found so bucolic. Even if police had arrived immediately, they might not have been able to find the attacker amongst the maze of plantings and blind alleys I found so intimate.

It’s not the first time a horrible crime has happened there. Since the park opened in 1976, there have been a number of murders, accidental deaths, robberies, rapes and other crimes. An article in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly, seeks to bring some of this to light. Entitled “Topography of Terror“, the author makes the point that the danger of the park is in its design. The same features its award-winning architect, Lawrence Halprin, and I saw as a beautiful haven in the urban landscape, have made the place a preying ground for some of the worst parts of modern society.

There’s always a flip-side to any urban design. There’s always a danger that a beautiful public structure can be perverted. The challenge for modern urban planning is to take into account the beauty and the evil it attracts.

Next time I’m in New York after September 23, I plan on checking out the new New York City Museum of Sex on 5th Ave at 27th St. If the museum is half as much fun as its exhibition website, “1001 Nights in Manhattan“, it should be a pretty good ride.

The Flash-based 1001 Nights site is a map of Manhattan, enhanced with the sounds of the city and with pop-up annotations to some of the more notable and notorious places related to New York’s sex history. But the coolest feature is that the map is also a bulletin board, allowing visitors to enter their own annotations to memorable NYC sexual memories.

It’s a great idea for a site, and a terrific realization of the idea– so its no surprise that it comes from Entropy8Zuper. They’ve been doing net art for years, participating in the SFMOMA’s 010101 show with a wild artwork called Eden Garden 1.1, which reads a website, converting the text and html commands into rabbits, robots, Adam, Eve and lots of bunnies. You have to see it for yourself. (You can just drag this link to your Links bar in IE to view whatever page you’re looking at in Eden.Garden.)

Be sure to check out the Heavenly Airport page to see some of e8z’s older work.

Since Amazon.com released its Amazon WebServices, several developers have been making some interesting use of the technology.

Paul Bausch’s “Weblog BookWatch” surveys the recently-updated blogs list at weblogs.com, searching their pages for links to Amazon (using the Google API). It then takes the 10 most-mentioned books, looks them up on the Amazon site and presents the list, with pictures, book & buying info, and links to the blogs which mentioned the book. (Paul is probably happy right now that the book he co-wrote with Matt Haughey and Meg Hourihan, We Blog, is at the top of the list.)

Kokogiak.com has Amazon Light, a simple interface to Amazon’s data. It returns search data from Amazon without all of the visual clutter (and without the selling opportunities for Amazon’s seemingly endless group of stores). There’s even source available for the .asp pages which drive the site.

Another fun one is Quasimondo‘s Flash-based amazonSearch. After returning your data from a search, it displays the bookcover and related books, drawing lines between the books to represent the relationships. Click on a book and retrieve it’s related books, move the covers around, find data on the books in a resizable panel. Very cool!

Erik at Mockerybird.com (a very interesting combination of blog, wiki and online novel) maintains a list of applications developed using the Amazon Web Services. I’m sure his list is going to keep growing.

Now, since my wife works for Amazon’s main competitor, I feel a little strange linking to the Amazon site when I discuss books. Maybe B&N will release its own webservices soon, or maybe Powells will, or CDNow, or Blockbuster or Best Buy…

According to the SF Chronicle,

A belt buckle that raised suspicion with security workers at Los Angeles International Airport caused the temporary evacuation of part of a terminal area Sunday, authorities said.

The belt buckle had an image of an explosive device on it, said airport spokeswoman Gaby Pacheco.

What did the examiners think? That the belt buckle would explode because it had a picture of an explosion on it? Are they going to ban listening to “The 1812 Overture” next?