“Free storage and bandwidth forever” sounds too good to be true, but….

Not enough attention or credit has been given to JD Lasica’s OurMedia project. Opening today, the Learning Center:

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We’re starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you’d like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines. This is media training of the people by the people.

My ineptly pseudonymized friend “Kerr Mudgeon” has been whacking away at the gay marriage issue all week at his blog on the contrary.

He opens the series on a serious note with an essay titled “The Case for Gay Marriage.” His follow-on essay asks “What next? Are we going to have to let them marry their dogs?”

The curmudgeon is a bit of a prude for all his objective observation and risque language. He believes in love and commitment and I think even in moderation. In his final essay on the topic, “Heather has Lots of Families,” he observes,

Most first marriages in America end up in divorce. Many couples are in second or subsequent marriages. The median length of an American marriage is now a mere 8 years. So much for the idea that marriage is a lifelong commitment.

Over 1 million children each year have parents who have just divorced.

Like me, the curmudgeon is offended by the self righteousness and the hypocrisy at the roots of the right-wing so-called “christian” opposition to the formal commitment of marriage between same gender people.

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

Declan McCullough writes about yesterday’s House rejection of net neutrality.  He quotes Representative Markey, whose amendment offered the best hope for maintaining an IP  commodity market unpolluted by monopolistic practices:

“The future Sergey Brins, the future Marc Andreessens, of Netscape and Google…are going to have to pay taxes” to broadband providers, said Rep. Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat behind the Net neutrality amendment.

This matter, the shifting of tax burden from payments to government to assure decent public services in fair markets to payments to corporations to fund infrastructure “adjustments” that are best for the stockholders, deserves a closer look.

John Palfrey will lead the “making money” discussion at BloggerCon. Looking at the cursed power law, there would seem to be three subsets to examine: the asymptotic risers - those few who aggregate attention in a mass media modality; the inflectioneers - people with blogs to be found around the inflection point of that cursed power curve; and the waggers - numerically huge, enormously influential for a variety of reasons, residents of what has been labelled the long tail and then largely ignored or misinterpreted. The power law presents a two dimensional view that obscures much of what is important about the last decade’s revolution in publishing.

Among the attributes obscured: community, medium, intention, and influence. To which community or communities does a particular web presence contribute? List a few communities… the legal, the journo, the technoid, the telecom, the literati, the eeleomosynary, the political left, the polictical right, educators, librarians, age peers. The list goes on and there are certainly sub groups among each of these. The web empowers each of us, it offers emerging communications tools that we integrate into our daily lives. No longer are we confined to the alpenhorn and yodeling to be heard across great distances. No longer does our yodeling impose on the ears of the disinterested, because choice dominates clickage.

This may be one of those “posts in progress,” because I have a meeting. Maybe it just ends here because I have ADD.  For further reading pleasure, just go here…

she: cousin… la….. bla bla detail… met him at a barmitzva in boulder…. detail detail he had his colleague call me… detail detail detail… and he said i’m handicapped too i’m in a chair i’ve lost 2 legs… detail detail detail…
me (perking up): what? what? wait, Stop. the guy has no legs? HOW did he bring this up? what was the lead up?
she: well, i was telling him about my friend, I Forget who, who started a pbs show about cooking with the blind…
me: oh my god. no. what’s it called this show?
she: cooking without looking.
me: no, no… ( here i laugh, really laugh, for a good full two minutes. i realize i haven’t laughed like that in a while. driving all laughs into one. we are at my level. it has come to this struck me funny.)

(The above excerpt is not entirely without intention. It perhaps illustrates two things: one, that personal creative choices will lead us to vocational opportunities that are unique and personal, viz “Cooking Without Looking;” and, two, that this thing called blogging is its own reward, comprising readers and writers, linkage and thinkage… and sometimes - yes - stinkage, but not today, neither in this post’s origins nor in the novel in progress that I’ve linked here… we have an opportunity to help each other carry the canoe on that long portage, and sometimes there will be blueberries and sometimes there will be biting insects, but all in all, when the loon calls and the sun sets on the lake beyond, there are no simple answers, rather there are all these complicated relationships and quel domage that we find so many of them parsed into fifty minute segments with an IRC back channel).