Listics

Jeneane provides the lynx at "The Content Factor."

SBC Ameritech is messing with me.  My Outlook client stopped sending email yesterday.  I did what I could to test and reconfigure and test some more.  No luck.  I called my mail host provider, Berbee, Inc.  Berbee is a local company that has provided me superb service for over ten years.  Maybe Sandhill could save some money by consolidating services, but I like doing business with these people.  It’s good to have a host you can count on.

Okay.  I called Berbee tech support and talked with Kristen Quigley and Kristen asked if I used SBC.  "Are you an SBC Ameritech customer?" she asked me.  I sheepishly admitted to it.  "They’ve blocked port 25," she said.  Okay, I reconfigured the SMTP parameter from mailhost.sandhilltech.com to mailhost.mad.ameritech.net and I can send mail again.  Now outbound mail from my home offices goes through SBC’s SMTP service instead of Berbee’s. 

My question is, WHY ARE THEY MESSING WITH ME?

Among the dozens of professional conference opportunities I’ll be missing this spring, Freedom to Connect stands out.  I’m an introvert so it takes a lot of energy for me to connect with people.  This conference brings together a number of people whom I’ve met and whom I’d like to know better with a number of people I haven’t met but would like the opportunity to meet and hear real-time.  I wouldn’t miss this for anything but the family obligation that has me elsewhere, NOT in Washington DC on March 30 and 31.

The fee is ridiculously low:  $250 for a full two day conference ($350 special procrastinators rate after March 1).  If you have an interest in Internet infrastructure and the policy issues that will channel our opportunities for the next decade or so, then you should attend.  David Isenberg writes,

The future of telecommunications starts now; there’s a new U.S. Telecom Act in the works, there’s unbundling in Europe, fast fiber in Asia, wireless across Africa and networks a-building in cities and villages around the world. Lead the discussion. Shape the debate. Assert your Freedom to Connect.

The need to communicate is primary, like the need to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, socialize and learn. Better connections make for better communication. Better connections drive economic growth through better access to suppliers, customers and ideas. Better connections provide for development and testing of ideas in science and the arts. Better connections improve the quality of everyday life. Better connections build stronger democracies. Strong democracies build strong networks.

Freedom to Connect belongs with Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion and Assembly. Each of these freedoms is related to the others and depends on the others, but stands distinct. Freedom to Connect, too, depends on the other four but carries its own meaning. Unlike the others, it does not yet have a body of law and practice surrounding it. There is no Digital Bill of Rights. Freedom to Connect is the place to start.

Too often the discussion of telecommunications policy turns on phrases like "overregulation," and "investment incentives." These are critical issues, to be sure, but like the term "last mile," such phrases frame the issues in network-centric terms. As more and more intelligence migrates to the edge of the network, users of the network need to be part of the policy debate. Let’s put the user back into the picture. Freedom to Connect provides the frame.

There are forty or so speakers, discussants, debaters, and presenters on the program.  Included are at least a dozen top flight professionals who blog… people like Weinberger, AKMA, Crawford, Jarvis, MacKinnon, Malik, Michalski, Werbach, Dewayne Hendricks, Dan Gillmor, and of course David Isenberg.  The registrant list is filling out into a who’s who of smart people informed about stupid networks.  Martin Geddes, Jon Lebkowsky, Judith Meskill and Bob Frankston are on the list as of today.

Vint Cerf and David Weinberger are keynoters.  Charlie Firestone from the Aspen Institute will be there moderating a debate.  Scott Heiferman, the Meetup guy, will be there to represent our interests vis à vis Freedom of Assembly.

I wish I could be there too.

According to yesterday’s Guardian, "…Canada wants all
governments to accept the testing and commercialisation of ‘terminator’
crop varieties. These are genetically engineered to produce only
infertile seeds which farmers cannot replant."

There is only one reason for the development of these terminator seed strains: corporate profit.  The risks associated with terminator strain genetic drift into the general food seed stock are huge.   The  business model that cuts off the marginal operation from maximizing it’s own investment in seed stock is cruelly exploitative.  The narrowing of edible options for a growing population is culturally demeaning.

But if you like an exclusive diet of iceberg lettuce and white corporate tomatoes, you’ll love terminator crop varieties.  Monsanto manufactures these seeds.  I understand that General Motors owns Monsanto.  And everyone knows that what’s good for GM is good for the world.

What the hell.  The contaminated air will kill us long before we starve from the food value free terminator crops.

Sounds like a tooth condition.  Someone whose judgment I trust sent the Plaxo bot skittering across the net to shake out my details for her address book.  Okay.  I filled in the card and signed up for Plaxo myself.  I was a bit surprised when the free service gave me an immediate opportunity for an upgrade to the tune US$20 per year. 

The Plaxo set-up is simplicity itself.  All your Outlook email contacts get listed in this nice tidy list.  So I look at the list and I realize that most of my peacenik friends are paranoid about stuff like this, so that leaves blogging friends, professional contacts, and a bunch of miscellaneous contacts, friends and family.

It’s not easy to check the little boxes when you should be bed because you have a fever of 102 degrees and your teeth are chattering and the next cough threatens to wipe out your screen in a haze of viral mist, but some things we do because we’d rather not be lying flat on our back wasting time.  So, I left my home in Georgia and found myself sitting on the dock filling in little check boxes hallucinating Otis Redding in the background.

Not everyone feels real mellow about Plaxo.  One of the awkward things to come out of this experience was spamming a professional contact list (Did I really put a check in that box?  When are keyboarding and operating heavy equipment the same thing?)  One of guys says the message I sent that came from Plaxo came with a Mydoom variant attached.  A woman on the list pointed out that "friends don’t let friends drive Plaxo."  Do you have any Plaxo stories you’d care to share? 

The bad news is the list of links you get when you google "Plaxo is evil."  I hadn’t thought to do this before I dove in headfirst.  The good news is that, according to this comment on a post at Judith Meskill’s social software blog,

When you remove your account, all information associated with the account is also removed from our servers. This includes the address book information you were using Plaxo to help manage (ie: your contact information for friends, associates, etc…). Members can remove their account at anytime by going to: https://www.plaxo.com/delete_account and following the simple instructions.

Also: under full disclosure, even after removal, your account information may be stored within a backup or log file as part of normal system maintenance and backup. We maintain log files for 30 days. But your information still falls under the provisions of the Privacy Policy in place at time of collection. As you may already be aware, our privacy principles are:

- Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
- You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
- You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.
- Plaxo will not update or modify Your Information without your permission.
- Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties, unless required by law or in accordance with your instructions.
- Plaxo does not send spam, maintain spam mailing lists, or support the activities of spammers.

These provisions and more are covered in our Plaxo Privacy Policy found at: http://www.plaxo.com/privacy/policy . If you have any further questions, please let me know. Thanks.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com   

And so to bed… at least one more day of this thing in front of me.  Seems to have morphed from flu to bronchitis.  Yuch…

From Shelley’s comments, I learned about a new tool, a Firefox extension, Foxylicious, that integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks.  Cool.  Sort of a complimentary dessert after the cheap eats at the semantic web cafe.

Shelley’s post is a thorough look at tags with beautiful photos interspersed in the flow of a somewhat technical post…  Foxylicious in its own right!

Thanks to Ryan Irelan for this handy "To Do List" listmaker link from the Basecamp folks.

Vegetarian Doctor Weinberger delivered the choicest tidbit of the webcred conference over dinner last night.  This little match girl, nose earnestly pressed to window, ragged sleeve wiping condensate from the glass in order to get a better view of what’s going on inside, found this morsel in the transcription from last night.  Drawing the three threads of his speech - ethics, blogging, and taxonomies - Joho said:

we’re engaged in a global project of taking down the trees and rolling in the leaves

Makes me want to hang up this consulting gig and get one of those high paid jobs blogging as a bioinformatics-ethicist.