We moved and for many months I got along fine using my cell phone and wall clocks and car clocks to check the time. But, there came a point when I had to admit  that having a wrist watch was a convenience I missed. Maybe it was when I read about some absurdly expensive watch, a watch that was more jewelry than timepiece, but at some point I decided I’d try to replace the watch I lost. I looked for an exact match and could not find one. After a little research, I decided I didn’t need diamonds and gold and such. I didn’t need a Rolex or a Piaget. This expanded the range of affordable options open to me. Anybody who has used Google and Amazon to help them find a product or realize a materialist fantasy doesn’t need me to recapitulate my process. I searched. I compared. I priced. I weighed and considered. And eventually I came up with a product that Amazon could provide that I thought would do the trick. While I hadn’t tried it on, I was comfortable that if I didn’t like it, I could return it, so I ordered it up and what do you know? It’s been everything I hoped it would be.

My new watch is a Citizen Eco-Drive with a perpetual calendar. I’m hoping it’s my forever watch, the last one I’ll need to buy. (Did you know that some people collect watches? They have a watch wardrobe that they swap around and mix and match with their attire like some people swap out cuff links. Did you know that there are some people who wear cuff links?) My new watch has a sapphire crystal that won’t scratch and a titanium case and band that are both tough and lightweight. If I fall off a boat and drown in less than 200 meters of water, the watch will keep running. It’s the only watch I own. I flatter myself that it would look good whether I was wearing a tuxedo or a wetsuit, if I owned a tuxedo. Or a wetsuit.

The watch is solar powered. I’ll never have to change a battery. I could leave it in the dark in a drawer for a couple of months before it would run out of stored solar power. It’s radio controlled. It sets itself to the atomic clock so while it can gain or lose a few seconds every month or two, if it does, then it will correct itself and be synchronized to provide the exact time whenever I look at it. It has a perpetual calendar. I set it once, and I’ll never have to set it again. Unlike all the other calendar watches I have ever owned, this one knows how many days there are in the current month and won’t get confused until the year 2100. It keeps track of daylight savings time for me, and it has an easy adjustment to local time when I’m traveling. In the future, when I have wandered off down the twisted byways of senile dementia, this watch will be the most rational thing about me. I find that oddly pleasing.

[Was this what drove Carmen Ortiz nutz? -fp-]

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, by Tim Brown

To my knowledge, nobody has surfaced the very real and likely possibility that twitter, an intelligence service’s wet dream, was used in Iran for something nefarious. A brute force analysis of the data presented in the Web Ecology Project’s report, “The Iranian Election of Twitter” might reveal the existence of agents provocateur agitating and inciting opposition to the Persian leadership. Who benefits? There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil oil in Iran.

What breadcrumb could I use to tease you all into leaving the safety of your syndication feeds, to venture into the raw and wooly lands of actual web pages? With that one sentence I’ve managed to exceed 140 characters, so I’ve already broken the rhythm of the web. Now, I seek to further fracture Web Flow by luring you directly to my lair.

I’ll be there.

At Burningbird, Shelley presents five free-standing blogs isolating several of her interests yet all aggregated and accessible under the wings of http://burningbird.net.

• MissouriGreen: all things Missouri and the South
• Bb’s RealTech: all things web, tech, semantic, and graphical
• Secret of Signals: writings about online video, movie reviews, video technology and so on
• Frugal Algorithm: surviving on little in a culture that demands much
• Just Shelley for everything else

If tech turns you on, but you aren’t interested in photography, then Bb’s RealIech and Secret of Signals are for you. I’m pretty much a fan of all things Shelley, and I think it’s fun to poke around in the archives of all her sites. At Burningbird Shelley has brought together good material going back ten years or more. It’s more than a blog, it’s a fine web publication. It’s a virtual coffee table book, an online magazine. Of course the latest stuff will be available in your feed readers, but to get a good taste of what Shelley’s accomplished and to explore a decade of burningbirditude, you’ll want to click through directly and skip the syndication feeds. Check it out real-time and click around with abandon. It’s worth a read.

A search via Bing for “der Bingle” turns up but one related search: “der Wienerschnitzel.” One fails to see the connection. Bing searches don’t reveal Wikipedia on the first page of results for either “der Bingle” or “Cap and Trade.” Blogger entries also seem low in the results ranking. By way of contrast, The Google places Wikipedia entries and blogger written references high in its search results. Zo, vat ve haff hier ist der Bingle mit der Limbaugher und also der Wienerschnitzel (eine zuchen-zeuge written by dem Katzenjammer Kidz) versus The Google with its Wikipediatrics and amateur sourcing. I’m guessing der Bingle will give das Yahoo! a run for its money, but The Google will leave them in its dust.

Wave positions Google to smash and mash the worlds of social media and cloud computing, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional email, to sink Sharepoint and other proprietary collaboration tools. Wave is friendfeed on steroids and it is so much more.

“Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today,” according to Lars Rasmussen, co-inventor of the product. After watching the developer preview, I’ve gathered that Wave is:

• “A personal communication and collaboration tool…”
• “A simple communication object…”
• “…an HTML5 app…”
• Open source…
• a shared object hosted on a server somewhere…
• a return of the BBS bulletin board, but now with real time interaction…
• a mash-up of email and IRC chat
• shared screens with events registering real-time on all participants’ browsers, keystroke by keystroke
• embeddable… you can embed a wave on any website
• like a wiki only better — drag and drop file sharing!!

So, there’s a sophisticated threading that happens… you write, I watch what you write and I compose while you’re writing. Instead of the basic asynchronous nature of online chat or email, you doing a [write - wait - read] thing, while I do a [wait - read - write] thing, we become aware of each other in real time like in a real conversation and we compress those asynchronous [wait] intervals out of the interaction. Or, the conversation can, as in email, continue asynchronously if one of us is offline, away from the Wave.

Any time we want, we can pull in another participant, who can come up to speed by doing a “playback” of the entire interaction to that point: an instant replay of all the “he said/ she said/ he said/ he added/ she said…” stuff from the beginning of the conversation to the present. Any subset of participants can spawn their own “wavelet” within a wave to take a private conversation “offline,” hammer out an issue, and then rejoin the public conversation. The private interaction is available via playback to those who participated, but screened off from those who were not included. Playback allows us to track changes and to revert, making it chock full of wiki goodness.

Also wiki-like (but more powerful) is the drag and drop file sharing feature. I can drag a file from my desktop and drop it in the wave, essentially broadcasting it to everyone else who is on that wave. Sharing objects via drag and drop from the desktop to the browser isn’t yet supported by HTML5 so at this point it’s accomplished using Google Gears. The Wave team has put in a feature request to the HTML5 working group.

The Google Wave API supports extensions so applications can be built to interact with the Wave. The extensions are either “robots” or “gadgets” built to extend and enhance the Wave’s functions. A robot is an automated participant in a conversation buried deep under the covers. Robots interact with waves, talk with users and perform simple tasks like pulling up information such as stock quotes from outside sources. Gadgets? A gadget is a Google Wave extension that helps define the look and feel of the wave. A gadget can be the hub for an online game played by Wave participants. The Wave that contains the gadget is the gadget owner, not the user who added the gadget. Gadgets can be written with a text editor and hosted anywhere outside a firewall.

Mashable has a nice “Wave Guide” by Ben Parr that includes all the terminology you need to get comfortable with the Wave.

If you want to learn more Wave-ology, here is a list of links that can get you started:

• twitter @waveappreview
• A couple of YouTube think pieces on conversations
  1. Limits of Conversational Structure
  2. MIT’s Deliberatorium/Collaboratorium
• Wave developer preview
• HTML5 Specification
  
• Dare Obasanjo – Developers on Google Wave
• Google Wave Federation Architecture
• Google Wave Federation Protocol
• Google Wave Extensions – the Wave API
  
• Shannon Clark repackaged at JOHO the Blog

it was the | was the best | the best of | best of times | of times it |
times it was | it was the | was the worst | the worst of | worst of times

Wolfram Alpha opened its doors today. What’s Wolfram Alpha?

…the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…

Go Nuts!

Six Apart released Movable Type 4.2 and I have a hosting arrangement that will survive the strain of the code-heavy low-performance scripting that made Moveable Type so famous. I loaded her up, picked a design, and got into the learning zone. An hour or so later, I realized I’m just not ready to invest a lot of time studying a system that limps along before I’ve even put a load on it, a proprietary structure that may be ever so well designed and secure, but that makes me feel like I’m prototyping in the bottom of a molasses vat.

If you are already a Movable Type fan, then this latest release may be just what you need. As for me, I’ll stick with what I know. Spending the time improving my skill with WordPress or Drupal will be a lot more worthwhile than trying to come up to speed on Movable Type.

Today, every time I hit the MT “publish” button and watched 12 to 15 seconds of my life evaporate while I waited for system processes to complete, I was reminded of why I left TypePad for my own third party hosted WordPress site a few years ago. In the three years I’ve used WordPress it has just gotten better and better. I’m sure Movable Type has improved in that period as well. This may simply be an “old dog, new tricks” situation. Or maybe not.

[tags]Twitter, blame it on the lisa nova, lisa nova[/tags]