Listics

Remember those Japanese toys that you had to stroke to keep alive?  Ben pointed out the iDog, a similar gadget.

With a built-in speaker, a distinct array of moods, and
a personality that changes with the music you "feed" it, iDog is a

faithful music companion.

Welcome to Netvibes!

This is your personalized page, you can now modify everything: move modules, add new RSS/ATOM feeds, change the parameters for each module, etc. Your modifications are saved in real-time and you’ll find your page when you get back on Netvibes.com. If you want to be able to access your page from any computer, you can sign in (at the top right) with your email and a password.

The content is available from the "add content" button at the top left of this page.

Feel free to check the Netvibes blog to stay tuned about new features on the site.

…and they’re collaborating with Writely.  This Web 2.0 thing has exploded.

With a little help from our friends…

Michelle Goodrich put the logo together at Mandarin Design in a table layout.  Chris Locke captured it as a graphic image using one of the tools he’ll talk about next week.  Frank Paynter stole it because it looks cool and posted it right here on this blog!

Next week, I’ll assemble responses to this question and I’ll serialize them here and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Meanwhile, I think a little Bo Diddley background music is called for.  And if anyone can find the Doors, the Yardbirds, or the Stones doing this same tune… well, it would be a community service to post the .mp3

How do you blog, how do you blog, how do you blog…

.gc

In 2024, when he was a very young man, Aaron Swartz published the following license haikus (that’s Aaron on the right above, in 2024, much older as you can see)…

• PD: do what you feel like / since the work is abandoned / the law doesn’t care
• MIT: take my code with you / and do whatever you want / but please don’t blame me
• LGPL: you can copy this / but make modified versions / free in source code form
• MPL: like LGPL / except netscape is allowed / to change the license
• GPL: if you use this code / you and your children’s children / must make your source free
• RIAA: if you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain

In 1995, Heather Levien shared the following with regard to her dissertation…

Earlier in this century, various British and American modernists
deployed textual innovation to trace out the precise specificities
of multiple characters’ consciousness interacting within the
work of art.  Depictions of individuals in novels such as Ulysses,
The Waves and As I Lay Dying
were surrounded by various sorts of ellipses intended to emphasize
the importance of the spaces between individuals.  The more
recent work which I intend to examine emphasizes the positioning
of the individual in relation to its various spacial and temporal
contexts, focusing
not on individuals separated by some sort of break or lapse but in their
constant connection to a variety of social and historical contexts
and discourses.

More recently, Danah Boyd averred,

Professional conferences are fundamentally social networking events;
don’t let anyone convince you that people are there to listen to
lectures. We attend to connect with the people that we know and meet
new people who might inspire us (or hire us). Professional conferences
are also primarily word-of-mouth events, particularly the smaller ones.
You go because your colleagues are going or because someone you know is
going and you track their whereabouts. Additionally, speakers are
frequently chosen by organizers who they know; they hope these speakers
will attract a particular (paying) crowd. Well, by and large, we are
friends with, listen to and know of with people like us, making
conferences painfully homogeneous affairs.

Read the rest of this entry »

If only Rube Goldberg could see this!
(Thanx to Amanda Congdon for the link).

Oh, and if you remember this, raise your hand.
(Thanx to the Real Paul Jones at UNC, and thanx to Tola for reminding me).

Finally, this ought to give you a lift.
(Caution… pdf ahead.  Courtesy of liftport.)

(Bravo to Dr. W. for pointing to the brief Lessig post in Wired…)

Lessig’s comments on the Authors Guild brouhaha around Google Print and copyright are of the "let’s you and him fight" variety and to be expected from a lawyer trained in the adversarial arts. Certainly if Google was a mom and pop scannery making indexed versions of print publications available under fair use provisions of the copyright law, the Authors Guild would not have seen value in a lawsuit (though arguably they may have chilled mom and pop right out of business with the threat).  Lessig would like to see Google defend their right to scan printed matter and make indexed information of copyrighted textual work available within the fair use guidelines of American copyright law.  He seems to be afraid that they will reach a settlement with their antagonists and that the matter will be resolved without the ritual opening of purses to the Knights of the bar.

I want Google’s work to continue more than I care about the legal jousting.  Google’s project has been underway for about two years.  They have a program for publishers, a program that should protect the rights of authors.  Google is "partnering" with four universities and the New York Public Library to digitize a lot of books.  If it was strictly a cash and carry contractual relationship, a project with libraries paying a scanning and indexing company a fee for service, then the complexities of fear associated with the newly risen corporate monolith of Search would be easily dismissed.  But since Google is a full partner whose shareholders have interests in some ways orthogonal to the libraries users’ interests, the matter is more complicated than Larry Lessig allows.

(Disclosure:  I’m a bit of a socialist with a desire to draw a bright line between private commerce and public concerns.  Schools, libraries, and access to information on the net are public concerns.) 

Straw poll… if I had more than a few readers who were willing to follow links and comment, I’d ask about the relative level of interest people feel about these two items…

Dan Bricklin introduces wikiCalc (rel 0.1)

Dave Winer publishes Gates/Ozzie memos

Personally, I’m voting for wikiCalc.  No offense to the captains of industry, you understand… but whether it’s killer apps or apps that give you butterfly kisses on the cheek, Dan’s the man.

I could tag this technorahrah, or I could tag this del.icio.us or spu.rio.us or whaddevah…  but I have chosen to use my little ol’ typepad blogorama to store the link and I hope I find time to get back to it so that some day I may make my fortune in wonderful world of codery.  If I don’t die first.

AJAX TUTORIAL

and thanks to Joey d. for the "suit friendly" linkdump!  I enjoyed it almost as much as the parade o’ Archie comix!